Artem, Bryce and I ran the Urbanathlon in NYC this past weekend. It was pretty great.

We drove down to Artem’s house in New Jersey, dropped some stuff off, and then took a train to NYC. We got to the gym to pick up our registration packets at 7:40, and saw Jessie/Hardcoretraceur, X, and M1l3s there. We hung out outside the gym for a while, then split ways and headed towards Artem’s grandparents house in Brooklyn.

All I can say is: Goddamn can Russians cook. And goddamn DO Russians cook. We must have eaten two or three meals in the… 2 hours we were there and not sleeping.

Got to sleep at 11:30, then woke up at 3:30 to hop on the train to Manhattan. We all got to our places with varying degrees of fail (Artem took the express train by accident, the train I needed was closed so I had to walk, Bryce missed one of his trains), and then the race began! Artem ran the first leg of the race, and did quite well, running a 22 minute 5k, including the time it took to pass the obstacles (Jersey barriers, climbing through tubes). He passed me the timing chip, and I took off. Passed my obstacles with absolutely no difficulty. I was actually a little bit disappointed in how easy they were (Scaffolding maze, Marine hurdles). I passed off to Bryce, who took off up the 52 flights of stairs in World Trade Center Building 7. He completed those in 13 minutes. Absolutely amazing. We actually missed him on the way down, because we didn’t expect him to do them that quickly.

We all met up again at the finish line, where Jessie and I took to playing with the taxis hurdles and the 8ft wall climb. We got a nice shot of us simultaneously konging the taxis (I actually slipped and had to roll on the concrete, which worked out well), and then we flew over the wall, much to the surprise of the marines milling about.

Afterwards, the six of us met up with Pyro and Exo, and we went to central park to play Ultimate Frisbee. Then our team went back to NJ, ate about thirty pounds of Russian food, and then passed out.

It was a great weekend. Next year, we’re running it all solo. And actually training for it a lot more (broken bones are not conducive to training).