Urban Challenge

A Little Help from Our Friends

by Marc Chalufour

Any runner worth his or her salt knows that the streets of Boston can be humbling. So it was that my teammate, John Carter, and I found ourselves sitting beneath a Commonwealth Avenue monument to Leif Ericson, unsure if we were going to be able to continue.

The race was almost over—in fact the finish line was a mere mile away. Don't be confused, though. We weren't headed for the famed finish on Boylston Street, but rather to the front door of Jillian's, a bar on Lansdowne Street that was serving as the race headquarters for the Urban Challenge.

The Urban Challenge isn't quite a running race (when, after all, have you ever been given a head start for knowing who James Bond was named after?), and it isn't quite an adventure race. The best way to describe it is probably as a frenzied scavenger hunt, carried out on a grand scale. Born from a game that race director Kevin McCarthy cooked up for his daughter's 12th birthday party, the Urban Challenge toured 20 cities this year.

In each city, 12 checkpoints were selected and 12 clues leading to those checkpoints were developed ("Checkpoint 3 shares its name with the last two words of the title of this absurd film by a famous filmmaker who plays the clarinet," for example). Teams of two raced through Boston and the surrounding towns, by foot and/or public transportation, and tried to capture a digital photo of themselves at each checkpoint.

Like any race, speed is of the essence. But as many of the Boston teams learned the hard way, a little common sense and a willingness to slow down and think the clues through went a long way.

Over 100 teams gathered at Jillian's early on a muggy Boston morning for the race's Trivia Challenge. Thirty multiple choice questions later, and the starting order for the race had been determined. The top scoring teams on the quiz would start immediately, with groups starting in three minute intervals after them. To further spread teams out, each squad was assigned a different starting point. Carter and I would be starting with Checkpoint 4, working our way through the list, and ending with Checkpoint 3. (Bond, in case you were wondering, was named for a Philadelphia ornithologist.)

Once we were out on the course, Carter and I began charging down Lansdowne Street—hoping that we were going in the right direction for our first clue. As it turned out, we were headed for Harvard Square in Cambridge first, probably the furthest point we would travel from the race headquarters. A bus ride and a couple miles of running later and we'd already reached the first two checkpoints. But we'd also seen some teams hot on our trail.

As we ran towards the Harvard Square subway station, we got on the cell phone and began calling friends, looking for help on the next clue. As the race bore on, the help of Jenny Yim, Paul Hyman and Doug Olney over the phone more than made up for our lack of pre-race preparation. It's safe to say that without their research we might still be wandering the streets of the North End, and we certainly wouldn't have ever made it to our final checkpoint—Tiger Lily, a restaurant that shares its name with the last two words of Woody Allen's film What's Up, Tiger Lily?.

In fact, we almost didn't make it that far despite all of their help. As we had sprinted towards a bus early in the race, Carter and I had spied another team heading for a statue. When we read that our second to last checkpoint was a statue of an Argentinian president, located in the Back Bay, we assumed we were all set. For future reference, never assume anything in the Urban Challenge, or it will likely come back to bite you.

The next two hours went smoothly (or so we thought). With just two checkpoints to go before finishing, and confident that we were doing very well, Carter and I snapped a photo at Checkpoint 1 and began our run towards that statue. Had we only taken a closer look early in the race, we would've seen that the statue was not, in fact, an Argentinian president, but rather a Norwegian explorer. So there we were, sitting at Ericson's feet, having called everyone we knew in hopes of discovering the location of this mysterious statue. As it turned out, the statue was located not more than three blocks down Commonwealth Avenue from where we sat. Fortunately we stumbled across it before wasting too much time, and then we made a dash for Tiger Lily, snapped our final photo there, and charged back towards Jillian's, ultimately reaching the doorway just in front of another team.

Overall we were pretty satisfied to learn that we had crossed the line in eighth place...until we went through the check in process and discovered that we had mis-identified one of the check points, thus disqualifying us. We weren't the only team that had been stumped, however, as six of the teams in front of us were also DQ'd.

Checkpoint 10 proved to be our undoing. "This Charlestown native and Boston Latin graduate gave his life for his country. Find his place of honor in the Public Garden..." the clue read, in part. Upon finding a prominent statue of a man who had attended Boston Latin, Carter and I—and a number of our competitors—didn't think twice about taking the picture and moving on to the next clue. How many Boston Latin grads could be honored in the Garden, after all? The answer, it seems, is at least two.

But there was no cause to gripe. Like Rose Ruiz 22 years ago, we hadn't completed the Boston course. Those were the rules. So, sitting in the bar afterwards we couldn't help but feel a little deflated. We'd whisked through the course in little over 3:30:00, confident that we'd nailed each of the clues. Once the dust had settled, the team that was awarded the victory had finished a scant two minutes in front of us.

If anything, though, we were left with a hunger to do the race again. Like everyone who runs Boston, we wanted that finishers medal and we weren't going to give up until we earned it.