The task: Get a pingpong ball out of a bucket in the middle of a field without walking onto the field.
The tools: a rope, string, a bucket, two carabiners, a hook, some wood, a mallet, a few spikes and lots of water.
While other teams in the inaugural U.S. Challenge “intelligent adventure race” last month in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains struggled with the puzzle, the five-member Washington Group International team – with three Colorado athletes – took action. They installed a rope over the field, spiked a hole in their bucket and rigged a pulley system to ferry their water-dripping bucket to the pail with the ball. In a few minutes, they had floated the ball out of the bucket and they were off and running.
Turns out all those riddles, brainteasers and word games the team e-mailed each other in the past six months were actually training exercises. And they worked. The Washington Group International team won the contest and will compete next month against veteran European teams in the World Team Challenge, an unusual endurance contest that marries the typical physical demands of adventure racing – trail running, mountain biking, paddling and orienteering – with problem-solving puzzles.
“There were many ways to do it, but as with most of the problems in the race, there was one way that was much simpler than the others,” said Paula Bowman, a 43-year-old electrical design engineer from Littleton. “In all the stages, (the race organizers) tempt you to try to do too much, and they penalize you if you are not successful. The trick is to identify the most efficient and optimal strategy.”
Bowman joined Denver-area mechanical engineers Rudy Bellinger and Gary Cuffin on the winning team. The contest, a multistage race, is designed as a corporate team-building exercise. The Challenger World race series – wildly popular in Europe – pits teams from some of the world’s largest corporations in contests that require more brains than brawn.
That’s not to say the physical requirements aren’t demanding. Day and night stages in the first U.S. Challenge contest required mountain biking through the Blue Ridge Mountains, trail running and paddling down whitewater. Spicing up the races were checkpoints with logic puzzles or math games that earned bonus points. Teams turned in their solutions to the problems at the end of each stage, and organizers tallied bonuses and penalties before announcing a team’s final time.
Sometimes it was best to forgo the riddles and blow off potential bonus points in order to keep up a winning pace. The Washington Group team had a strategy of copying the often cryptic problems down and continuing the race, solving the problem among themselves as they ran.
Organizers sprinkled the races with puzzles that would require too much time to solve. If a team tried to solve all the puzzles, they would be delayed, lose time and incur harsh penalties for taking too long on the course. The winning strategy required identifying “sucker points” and ignoring some of the puzzles.
“They made you think all the time, all the way around,” said Bellinger, a 48-year-old triathlete who was the team’s chief puzzle-solver. “Most of the time the obvious answer to the riddle, or the simplistic solution, is not the right answer.”
The challenge of keeping the brain sharp and alert proved more demanding than the physical rigors of the two-day race.
“You have to learn to think on your feet,” Bellinger said. “You can do a lot to keep your body up to snuff, but it takes effort to keep your brain alert.”
