Marcy and John Beard, as our $50,000 National Champions, are obviously
in a special category of Urban Challengers. Their finals story is
below. You can also see a web page posted by one of their fellow
Austin racers, http://www.kipley.com/uc/,
which has a fascinating chat transcript of their support crew on
race day.
The Beards' complete posting from the Yahoo
Urban Challenge group:
Message: 4 Date: Wed, 6 Nov 2002
From: "Marcy Beard"
Subject: Notes from Austin
Hi! A bunch of us from Austin had an incredible
time last weekend! Meeting other racers and crew, learning about
Las Vegas, running 'til it hurt and then running some more, being
bewildered, knowing for sure that we were out of it so many times,
then actually making the finals. Amazing. We were incredibly lucky
(for once in that city) with everything that happened last Saturday;
many other teams could have been in the finals and on the winner's
stand. Congratulations to everyone who participated!
My husband and I were racing with 3 teams (one
team of 8, really) plus a slew of great phone support and one
ground person who mostly sat on the Skip Man in the a.m. to make
sure he didn't leave before we got there. We didn't guess very
well in the trivia and ended up in group 7. A computer outage
back home left us hanging during the first couple of clues, but
our crew finally started clicking with "The Beach". We had scouted
"Show Me the Chicken" on Friday but somehow managed to draw a
blank on clue #10 until our crew got it (at which point my husband
yelled it into the phone while leaping in the air, quite a humorous
moment!).
Luckily we skipped #11 based on distance from the
Strip. I agree with the assessments on that clue. All of the other
answers made perfect sense once you figured them out, but that
was rather obscure. We waited a long time for a bus back to Downtown
(luckily it was the 302 Express) where we sprinted, gasping for
air, legs burning, just managing to beat the pack of 7th, 8th,
and 9th place finishers who came through almost simultaneously.
Another suspenseful wait while they looked at the pictures (does
anyone else think that's one of the tougher parts of the race?).
And confirmation that we made it in the finals! Wow!
The finals were really interesting. Along with
Terry, I was quite humble sitting in the van with the Google guys,
the LA guys, some really fast runners and obviously intelligent
people. I can almost guarantee that I was the slowest of the bunch,
with the possible exception of the driver. Finishing the race
became my main goal at that point.
Trivia was 15 questions (10 main questions plus
5 sudden death to break any ties). I thought the questions were
somewhat easier. We started in 5th position, with 2.5 minutes
between teams leaving the starting line. I believe (correct me
if I'm wrong) that all 7 teams were from different cities, negating
most of the team info-sharing like we had done earlier. Along
with starting in a secret location, that left 2 racers and a set
of phone support to figure everything out.
Our phone guys "led" us around CP's 1-4, then we
waited a while for the bus with two other teams. We found out
later that another two teams caught a bus on the line to the north
of us first, but they were slowed by traffic across the Strip.
We had quite a bit of time to work on the longer clues and talk
with the crew about Kim chi and statues, until we reached UNLV.
Then it was dark (!) and we took off running.
The checkpoint 5 add-on was quite a stumper. We
slowly reeled it in, first having to find the desert garden, then
wishing for even a tiny LED light to help find the poem (we had
brought headlamps to the hotel but didn't bring them to the race),
then figuring out "Make it so". We started with "Mt Keitso" by
mistake, so I wandered around looking at plaques on benches while
John called the crew to ask them for help. I came across the bench
just as two other teams showed up. We took a chance and took our
picture with them nearby, wondering what they thought about the
flash of light in the middle of the darkness, then got the heck
out of there. That clue took us a long time.
We had heard that the lead team was way ahead,
so I was fairly sure we didn't have a chance. We even stopped
to buy a bottle of water on the way back to the Strip. We got
really lucky at that point - John had asked me to remind him to
look for the Skip Team every so often, but we forgot to look at
Hard Rock. We came down the stairs at NY, NY when I turned to
him and asked him to keep an eye out. Not 10 seconds later he
spotted them! They told us we were in 3rd. We shocked our crew
by finding "1090" and then seeing Miyabaya across the street a
couple minutes later (they were stumped on both of them). The
crew pulled Battista's out from somewhere just in the nick of
time as we were about to give up on it. Which was really lucky
because I still have no idea what the answer was for #12 (Terry,
can you share it?).
On the bus to Downtown we heard that the first
team in was DQ'd. Well, maybe we will come in second. When we
rounded the corner to the finish line, there was a HUGE crowd
of people cheering! What a rush! I wasn't quite sure what the
fuss was about, but it was really cool. Thank you to everyone
who stayed to watch teams finish!
I can't quite describe the rest of the evening
because it doesn't seem real. I feel for the Fluffy Bunnies for
their awesome effort, to get so close and not win based on a subjective
opinion. What a tough call for the Urban Challenge folks to make.
You guys are extremely classy and will be the ones to beat in
future races.
Congratulations to the other co-ed team for coming
in 2nd!
Big thank you to Urban Challenge for a great concept,
crisp execution, and for making so many people a part of it. Good
luck to all with next year's races!
Thanks! -Marcy Beard / Team Vignette
