Each year I participate in an adventure race with my sister-in-laws. I'm incredibly blessed to have three amazing sister-in-laws who are all into this kind of fun and adventure. This year we did a race called Spirited Women in Hawkes Bay. With the event postponed to a new date due to Covid, one of the team couldn't make it so the other three of us raced with a friend. I can tell you one thing - it was the muddiest adventure I've ever had!
The mountain bike leg of the race was cancelled because of the mud (there is definitely no way you could have ridden a bike through it!), so that left a kayak and rogaine trek around farmland with the goal of navigating to find checkpoints. Last year's race took us 8.5 hours rather than the maximum of 6, so the imposed 5 hour time limit this time was a welcome relief. Each checkpoint was worth one point, each mystery activity was worth 4 points, and every 5 minutes your finish time was over the 5 hour time limit cost you one point.
And then... once we were out there, we encountered more mud than we had ever imagined! The many feet of teams that had started in races before us had turned the farm tracks into a total bog.
I'm no princess who is afraid of getting a little dirt under my nails, mind you, and I'm not unacquainted with mud. I was once covered head to toe in mud during a pond clean-up turned mud-fight. And for years I trudged through thigh deep mud at low tide on the Tamaki Estuary to get rowing boats on and off the water (fancy pontoons are more in vogue these days!). But I've never traversed that kind of distance in mud that just never... seemed... to... end!
We didn't get many photos that did it justice. The team in the photo below on the left is not us, but it gives you an idea.
After a 45 minute kayak, almost 2 hours of squelching, skidding and sliding through sloppy, smelly mud, and one mystery activity, we were beginning to re-think our plan. Now that we had a bit more context, i.e. we knew the extent of the mud, how tired it was making us, and how slow our progress was through it, it started to become clear that our plan was too ambitious. And looking ahead at what we could see of the rest of our route, it was more of the same. So we adapted. Our original plan was strategic - the first thing we had identified was our goals, and that gave us clarity to decide how we were going to tackle the race. But almost 3 hours in, we changed our route from the muddy farm tracks to the unknown cross-country route that we had planned to return on. There was a risk we would run out of checkpoints and get back too early, but the alternative of trudging all the way to the second mystery activity and back through the same mud the whole way meant there was a much greater chance we would be out there for hours past our time limit. Something that did not seem like fun at the time!
Happily, the terrain was better from then on, and uneventful apart from me getting an almighty zap on the bum when climbing an electric fence into a bull paddock (not recommended - apparently they turn the voltage up for bulls!). We finished 20 minutes early and ended up 39th out of 188 teams. Many teams took up to 6 or 7 hours, losing most of the points they had accumulated in the first 5 hours. What a disaster if their goal was to compete! But then again, maybe not if their goal was the satisfaction of completing everything on offer. We were pretty happy with our result. What about you? Can you liken anything in this story to something you're working on? Do you have clear goals that help you decide how you tackle the challenge and plan your route? Do you have enough context to help you prioritise? Have you got alignment amongst your team so that when a change of course is needed you're all on the same page and ready to move?
My focus this year and next
It's not the season that is silly, it's the lead up to it right?! Someone actually said Merry Christmas to me the other day, then laughed at my shocked face! But yes, it is only mere weeks away.
Last year I promised myself I wouldn't book any work in December and would instead use it to catch up on loose ends and hopefully avoid the pattern of winding up to the end of the year instead of winding down.
Sticking to that has made October and November busy but it's official now, I'm not taking on any more work this year. I'll be finishing off the Strategic Thinker Development Programme I have underway and speaking at a conference then taking some time to tackle overdue projects, admin, business development work and planning for the next year.
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