I had a dream...

Written by: Leisha
Dave and I have been talking a lot lately about navigating.  I keep saying that some people's brains just aren't set up to be good navigators. Dave wants me to practice navigating so that in a race, we can work on it together and not always rely just on him.  I get that.  I really do.  But it seems like the more I work on it with my directionally challenged brain, the harder it seems.  I'm not saying it can't get better with practice but I'm definately not there yet.  All that to say, I had a dream last night.

I was doing an adventure race without Dave (shocking in itself).  I was racing with my friend Amy Paustian (who just did her first race, The Thunder Rolls, with her husband), my sister Tracy and one other female who I couldn't quite place.  So it was the four of us and we started off the race biking.  We went a long way, like 12 miles, when we ran into some kind of a street fair and decide to stop for a Coke.  We knew we were in the right place because we saw some other teams. So as we are sitting there resting, my teammates look to me to tell them how to find the first checkpoint. This is where I realize that I am navigating! But it didn't feel weird in the dream, just normal.  So I pull the maps out of my backpack and the first thing I realized was that I didn't laminate them.  (This cracks me up because this is usually the only time I actually touch the maps in an actual AR.  I'm the laminator.) We all decide that it isn't a big deal since the maps are printed on waterproof paper.  But then I look at the map and can't find any dots.  I had forgotten to mark the checkpoints!  What I great navigator I am. We can't even mark them on the fly because none of us brought the course outline booklet.  We realize the only thing we can do is go all the way back to the beginning and start over.  But here's the kicker, as we are leaving, we see a ton of teams just rolling in.  If we could have kept going, we could have been in first place!

Maybe this is why I don't navigate.