Sporadic entry time!
After three years or so of playing out in my head how much fun it would be, I have now officially completed a City Chase! My friend and fellow atmospheric chemist Avila suggested it about a month ago, and I immediately got very excited. And so, after $150, two trips to pre-registration, and a restless night akin to most 8-year-olds before Christmas, yesterday was the big day.
For those of you who don’t know, City Chase is a Canadian invention. It’s somewhat akin to Amazing Race, but over the course of 6 hours in an urban setting. There is no preset course; you have to complete 10 chasepoints and make your way back to the finish line, only proceeding on foot or by public transportation. The website specifies no cars, bikes, hang gliders or rickshaws (except under certain circumstances… I’ll get to that), and no breaking of laws or inhibiting other teams.
Before the start
I awoke to a day that was, not surprisingly, grey and wet. I was thankful that the rain was mercifully light as I walked from home to High Park Station, only to arrive at Spadina to see it was pissing rain outside. I put on my optimist shoes (?) and decided that this would just mean that water hazards during the course wouldn’t be important. I grabbed a coffee, picked up Avila, and we hopped on the 510 down to Metro Hall where our day would begin.
Having not actually been to the square at Metro Hall before, we followed the herd of white t-shirt wearing participants. We arrived just during the “Goodlife Fitness Warm-up”, which looked like a combination of callisthenics and jazzercise (side note: Apple’s dictionary does NOT recognise “jazzercise” as a word. Pity). We listened to the speech to kick off the race, which congratulated a guy turning 50 and two women wearing miniature foam versions of the CN Tower and SkyDome as hats, along with some inspirational words courtesy of… Chad Kroeger?… and some hints. And then…
The start
…a scavenger hunt! We needed to pair up with another team and managed to get: a page from a 2-day old newspaper, two people dressed with completely backwards clothing, the next Air Canada flight to Québec, a memorised recital of the first verse from inspriational-Nickelback-song (still not sure of the name…), a Mitsubishi logo on someone’s body (the red pen from the team we paired up with was very helpful to many), and the bible verse quoted during the clues. Our reward was a clue sheet with where we could find all the chasepoints. Without much thought, I saw that one mandatory station was nearby at the Rees Street Slip. I knew it would probably involve a kayak, and that I knew where Rees Street was from biking down to the waterfront trail, so we booked it there before people (a) figured out were Rees Street is, and (b) the lines got long.
Rees Street Slip – Chasepoint #1/#2
We arrived at Rees Street Slip. The task: paddle two kayaks, tethered together side-by-side, through a small slalom course. The lineup was relatively short, maybe 5 or 6 teams in front of us, and got long quickly. Added bonus: as it turns out, the pre-race chasepoint (raising $50 for Right to Play) was awarded here as well! Serendipitous, considering neither of us took the time to find this out before hand. With minor difficulty (neither Avila nor myself had ever been in a kayak before), we finished the course and quickly had our first two chasepoints. Huzzah!
King and Spadina – Chasepoint #3/#3.5
Our next plan was to head to another mandatory chasepoint out in Liberty Village. We caught the 510 at Lower Spadina/Queen’s Quay to head up to King Street. Another friendly team, clearly more prepared than us, kindly told us that the Toronto School of Art on Adelaide was right there, and would be easy to stop off at before heading to Liberty Village. This is where, in the past, where you sketch naked people (or, for bonus, a naked team member). This year, however, was urban design-based, and needed three recyclable items. We grabbed three plastic bottles off the street while running to Adelaide and headed in. The task was to recreate a famous landmark. We, rather fortunately, drew the Parthenon. Lots of pillar-type material was available. After some upgrading to our initial (read: crappy) design, we finished the task and moved on.
Also at the School of Art, we received a list of questions for another chasepoint, which involved looking for landmarks along the Spadina streetcar route, such as the colour of the door at 1 Spadina Crescent (green), the type of store at 429 Spadina (everyone’s favourite tattoo and barber shop), and the park south of King on Spadina (Clarence Square). We missed the requisite 12 items on the way up, and headed down the line again to get the rest… only to realise that we needed to hand in the info back up at Bloor. We held onto the answers until later.
Liberty Village – Chasepoint #4.5/5.5
We headed out to Liberty Village on the King streetcar to find the Metro parking lot (stupid me was looking for a Green P, forgetting that Metro is in fact a store now. How quickly I blocked out of my mind the horrible Metro at Bloor and Spadina). On the way, we happened across a dance studio with a chasepoint. Wheeeee! Avila and I learned the Merengue and had a good time hip-shaking for our unplanned chasepoint. We were doing remarkable well at this point… barely an hour gone by and we were almost halfway done!
We arrived at the Metro parking lot (easy to find due to the long lineup of participants waiting). The task – pair up with another team, and run around the neighbourhood looking for coloured letters to spell a word. The catch? You had to do it with a rickshaw, two people riding and two people running. I want to thank our partners in crime, Mandy and Leslie, in part for helping to tow the rickshaw (this part was fun – I had always wanted to try running a rickshaw), but mostly for Leslie’s friend who had already completed the task so that we knew that “Laughter!” was the word we needed to spell. For good measure, we ran around the neighbourhood quickly to make it look to the other participants that we had done something, and then made it on our way.
West Queen West – Chasepoint #6.5/#7.5/#8.5
While in line at the rickshaw place, another team mentioned that the Knit Cafe on Queen Street west of Ossington had another chasepoint. Already planning to head to Trinity-Bellwoods Park and to Aradia fitness, we slotted this stop in. The task – one of us had to knit two rows. Avila volunteered her services to this one, and not only learned to knit, but managed to knit two rows much faster than I had anticipated. Her words (paraphrasing): “It looked like crap, but it’s done!”
Next stop was the “Nestea Plunge” at Trinity-Bellwoods. One team member had to don a velcro-covered suit, take a running jump off a small trampoline, and stick to a wall on the other side of pool of water. The ground, trampoline, and inflatable wall-thing were all quite wet, so it was acceptable to simple hit the wall with two limbs since it was hard to actually stick. I got my sexy suit on a made a run for it… success on the first try! Sort of. I did hit the wall with both arms… but I hit hard enough that my right arm is pretty sore today, and I got velcro burn on my bottom lip, and I got drenched. Nonetheless, it was worth it.
Next stop was Aradia fitness, Toronto’s favourite place for women to do erotic fitness. One team member got to don a feather boa and learn a pole dancing routine. Avila did an admirable job here, looking like an old pro with her slides and grinds. Slightly more difficult was the turn around the pole, and it required a little more practice, but it was overall a quick challenge. We got our chasepoint, I got a sweet action photo of Avila spinning on a pole, and Avila got some skills to supplement grad school income – the city’s first knitting pole dancer? I think there’s a market out there…
The Annex and Yorkville – Chasepoints #9/#10
After Aradia, we hopped on the Bathurst streetcar up to Bloor and ran to Bloor and Spadina to go to GAP Adventures to submit our answers for the streetcar chasepoint. This was much more successful than trying to submit them at the much more closed version of GAP Adventures off of King Street…
A short subway ride to Yonge brought us to our last chasepoint, a Rogers store in Yorkville. We had to take photos of 2D barcodes and submit them wirelessly off a supplied Blackberry. The software was not very intuitive, and required restarting the application for every station, but once we figured this out, our method of Avila scouting out the barcodes while I clumsily tried to type stuff worked quite well. Soon we were finished out last chasepoint, and a subway ride back to St. Andrew Station and a run to Metro Hall finished our race after 3 hours and 50 minutes… good for 90th place out of 550 teams. We were pretty happy with the top 20% finish given this was our first go at City Chase.
We learned a bit about strategy this time around… the move to head to Rees Street first was a good one, but an extra 5 minutes or so to plot out the rest of our spots would have been a smart move. We know to avoid equipment-heavy chasepoints next time… fun, but they slow you down waiting in line if you don’t manage a passing lane card. We had a blast though… and hope to improve for August! Hopefully we’ll have some environmental chemists willing to join in for some friendly competition within the division, too…
Also impressive was the amount of help and cooperation from not only competitors, but from complete strangers. Other teams were quick to give hints and assistance, even unsolicited at times. And people were remarkably nice when I repeatedly dodged between them, or ducked under their umbrellas, or shouted “excuse me!” when immediately behind them. Streetcar drivers were chatty and helpful. Overall, Toronto was remarkably friendly on Saturday, and for that, I say, thanks, Torontonians!
