* From: Christopher Provost
* Event: NH Adventure 5K
* Date: 2014-06-14
* Event Details
This was my first NH Adventure 5K. The event was held at Liquid Planet, which is a water park in Candia, NH. Pretty easy to find and plenty of free on site parking. For obvious reasons, they closed the restrooms inside the park, but there were plenty of port-a-potties in the parking lot toward the entrance. No lines at all for these, probably because there wasn’t a huge field of racers – somewhere around 150. The park itself was clean and the volunteer staff were helpful. There was a free bag drop station and separate changing tents for men and women. Racers got a free t-shirt and water bottle and a ticket for either a free beer (choices were PBR, Bud Light, or Corona) or a free water. Besides the beer and water, they were also selling hot dogs, hamburgers, cheeseburgers, pulled pork sandwiches, and bags of chips, all reasonably priced. I opted for a free PBR, then purchased a second one and a cheeseburger for a total cost of $8. Notice how many times I wrote FREE in this section.
* Race Details
The course was timed and measured 3.1 miles according to the website. Some of the course ran through the park itself, but the majority was on a trail system surrounding the park. Part of the trail system wound its way through what must be a haunted house theme park for Halloween, so it was kind of cool to be running by fake cemeteries and other spooky stuff during the race. The obstacles were built by Tuff Crossfit in Nashua, NH. They were pretty basic and not too difficult: pipe crawls, monkey bars, short walls, over-unders, and cargo nets (both climbing and crawling under). They made good use of the terrain surrounding the park though. There were some pretty decent hill climbs. Despite the rain over the previous couple days, they weren’t all that muddy, but they were slippery thanks to the wet leaves. You had to be careful on the downhill portions. The final obstacle was wading through the edge of a pond at about waist level for ~25 yards before sprinting up a short hill to the finish line. Racewire.com did the timing for this event and results were posted pretty quickly. They broke the field up into overall, men, and women, but I didn’t see any separate age group categories in the results.
Overall, I thought it was a fun course. I even spoke to a woman who had run it before and she said they increased the difficulty of the course this year. My gut feeling is that this has the potential to be a really good local OCR if they keep at it.
* Rating
Below Average
