On Wednesday afternoon, I realized that the Rolex website had not published their virtual XC course walk yet and there were thousands of eventing fans at home who didn’t know what the course looked like. I decided to video the course and upload it onto Eventing Nation. Unfortunately it was 6PM and I only had one hour before I had to be at the Rolex cocktail party. If you know me, you know that once this challenge was presented there was no way I could back down.
So I grabbed my video camera and started to run the course. At fence 3, I was soaked by those innovative but menacing sprinklers. By fence 10, I had received funny looks from both Mark and Oliver as I was running past them soaking wet, holding a video camera, and laughing. What else could I do but laugh? At the coffin, I met David who told me (as only David can) that I needed to run faster to simulate course speed–after all, the horses did it in 11 minutes. So I ran faster.
I crossed the finish line 37 minutes after starting. I feel this was a pretty good time for a 4 mile run holding a camera in front of me and stopping at all the jumps to video them entirely. And did I mention I was wearing jeans?
Now why didn’t this video make it onto Eventing Nation? Unfortunately, when we reviewed the footage, we saw that the camera shook up and down so much when I was running that the resulting video looked like a cross between the Blair Witch Project and a video that NASA shows Astronaut trainees to make them throw up. On top of that, Rolex had put their course preview online by late Wednesday night. Overall, it was an exhausting, pointless experience, but I did learn that the run up the gradual hill to the Quarry in the back really takes it out of you, just like all the riders say.
If we get enough comments to today’s post then I won’t go on vacation to Siberia and forget my computer.
