Course Teasers

With a only a few more weeks until race day (or night), I want to share a few teasers with you related to the upcoming Impossible Panther AR. You already know the course will be an overnight course. Since we scheduled this event for June 19-20, you'll have about as short a "night" as possible at this latitude. You should have at least 7 hours of real darkness during the race - maybe more if it's overcast.

The start finish location will be different from previous IPAR's. We've narrowed it down to two locations and are awaiting final negotiations before we pick one and announce it. These two spots are about 400 meters apart, so it won't affect the overall course very much.

There will be three distinct rogaine sections: paddling, orienteering, and mtn biking. Teams can choose what order to do the sections. The general time breakdown looks like two hours to get the paddle points, 6 hours to get the orienteering points, and 6 hours to get the biking points. This time breakdown is a little deceptive because we've included travel time from the HQ/TA to the sections and back. Doing the full course will give you 11 to 12 miles of paddling.

If you did the math, you'll notice that our time estimates add up to 14 hours. We expect the fastest teams to clean the course in less than 12 hours, but there were so many cool spots we wanted to include, we decided to stretch the time limit to 14 hours so more teams could enjoy and clean the entire course.

I'd have more pictures from the course to share, but it was raining so hard most of the day on Monday that I didn't want to pull the camera out. Hopefully you'll have better weather during the race!

If you haven't signed up to race, register now!