bzarcher | The Alley Rally

OK, so back a little while ago,

flaggerx mentioned that there would be a Columbus 'Alley Rally' race, and asked if I'd be interested in doing it.

Since the idea of racing seems really fun but A) I don't have the money to drop onto a dedicated race car and B) I'm not exactly built like a jockey, the idea of a fun run around town, going off checkpoints and answering questions at various places in street legal cars sounded pretty fun! I'd been feeling a bit crap after this week, but I did want to try it, so Dave and Nancy came over, and we went down to the start point on Bethel Road. Me driving, Dave navigating, and with Nancy and Alex as spotters for us to help.

Reality set in a little after we actually went out to do the thing.

The first thing we noticed when we got to the starting point was A) God Damn, that's a lot of Subaru WRXes, and B) Wow, not many first timers.

Despite this being billed as a fun event to introduce people to the idea of coming out and doing more races with this Rally Club, and despite the fact that they ENCOURAGED NOVICES to race, the first thing the person running the thing told us as he gathered up the 'new' people was 'This is going to be a difficult race and isn't meant for beginners.' Um, o-k... The other thing we found out was that despite them making a big deal of all their races being run during the day time, they were going to run this starting at 6:30, so everything would be starting after dark (and featuring a lot of 'puzzles' that were supposed to be solved by counting things like telephone poles or basketball hoops on people's houses!)

A ton of the 'pro' types were loaded up with their own timing clocks, rally computers, and stuff like that. I was still pretty game for the fight, but it clearly felt like we were going to be at a disadvantage. I decided not to be too worried, though, since they kept saying that 'everyone will get lost!', and it seemed like it was supposed to be fun above all else.

The first leg went pretty well - we ran through and I felt like we got the hang of the clues and directions, and we were doing about the middle of the pack.

The second leg was -HELL-, especially since several of the directions / clues for where to go turned out to be FUCKING WORD GAMES, and in one case, the answer depended on a real estate sign being up! (Which is actually in the MANDATORY RULES PACKET we had to read as an explict "no-no" for landmarks and clues! So we probably went around it 3-4 times because we'd been told NOT TO LOOK FOR IT!)

When we finally got to that checkpoint I was pretty frustrated and pissed off, particularly since a 'fellow participant' decided to blast my windshield with his RALLY BRIGHTS coming around a turn, blinding me for a couple minutes, but the news that the -best- car to reach that checkpoint had been over 40 minutes behind the 'optimal time' made me feel a bit better, and the fact that the checkpoint was at a UDF and included a mandatory ice cream break also helped. :)

The third leg, we actually felt liked we kicked ass on - much clearer instructions, we seemed to really click on finding stuff, and we later found out that we turned in a 'perfect' time for that particular leg. We were told at the time that our car was running really well (up in 5th out of 14 racers), and we started the next leg feeling pretty damn good.

Fourth leg was also decent, but we had the interesting moment of getting to the checkpoint and observing one of the participants pulled over to the side of the road by a police officer, up against the side of the car and wearing a pair of handcuffs. We never did get the full story on that, but on the upside at least I wasn't -that- guy.

Fifth leg was back to the frustrating again, with a lot of stuff that depended on really expert differentiating between 'real' alleys and 'extended driveways' behind an apartment complex's buildings. Alex used my iPhone and google maps from the back seat to bail us out more than a couple times. (Also, the clues included a couple more 'illegal' targets, though I admit I got a laugh about one of them being some dude's beater Alfa Romeo that supposedly hadn't moved in years.)

Sixth leg was totally incomprehensible (including one direction that we looked at and realized was actually COMPLETELY WRONG AND IMPOSSIBLE TO ACHIEVE DRIVING LEGALLY) and was pretty clearly written up by someone who ONLY drove the route during daylight hours and never bothered to see if it would be any different as a night course. We'd been warned that the end point (the Bethel Rd. Texas Roadhouse) would close their kitchen at 11pm, and it was already 10:15 after the third time we got lost, so I made the decision to say 'fuck this' and head for the restaurant, where we hit the final checkpoint, turned in our card, and got dinner. We missed one of the final two checkpoints entirely, but to be honest, at that point, I don't think any of us cared that much.

With the deductions for questions we got wrong, missed checkpoints, and minutes off the optimal times, we ended up coming in 13th overall, but it didn't bother me too much. I also admit to taking some satisfaction in the person announcing the correct answers and such observing the multiple questions that NOBODY got right, which to my mind just keeps backing up the fact that this was put together incredibly poorly. Especially since Dave mentioned that the last time he'd done this, a few years ago, it had been a much simpler route with much clearer directions and objectives for the racers to solve.

The organizers also kept telling us about how the other rallies they run are 'much easier' and 'always run in daytime hours!' as a way, I think, to encourage us to come back, but it just kept highlighting to me what a terrible example of the experience this was. By the end of the little speech about how they wanted to encourage us to take part in more, I was committing acts of intense willpower to censor myself.

If they'd run this course starting at, say, 2 or 3pm instead of after 6:30pm, I suspect I'd have had a much different opinion, and probably at least come out of it with 'Well, at least we got to see a lot of pretty scenery and parts of Columbus I wouldn't normally drive around in, right?' Instead, we all got pretty frustrated at one time or another, tempers got frayed a few times, and my sensory experience was being in my car with the heater and defroster blasting so we could see, but also making the car itself fairly uncomfortable, straining to try and figure out what was a driveway and what was an alley as we drove down an unmarked, unlit street.

I felt bad at the end of the night because this had been, on paper, an exciting and fun idea. I felt bad because of how frustrated I got with something that was supposed to be fun, and for nearly losing my temper at friends. On the plus side, dinner was pretty decent, and we all burned off our stress with a lot of jokes and healthy smacktalking to each other. (One other thing that just occurred to me - aside from talking to a few people before we got going and at the UDF? Nobody actually bothered to talk to us. Not even someone coming by to say 'Oh, hi, are you new?' For an event that is supposed to encourage people to come back, they did a HORRIBLE job of trying to actually make a personal connection to retain anyone...)

I ended up telling Dave that I'd like to try this again some time, but I don't want it to be one that this particular rally club is running.