Race Report: Great Greenville Race

A couple of weeks ago, I saw a LivingSocial deal for a race entry. I have never seen race entries on LivingSocial before (Botox injections yes, race registration no! ;-) and the name of the race didn't mean anything to me, but I clicked on it anyways and soon found myself scanning the website of the "Great Greenville Race".

Description from the website:

"Introducing Greenville, SC's official scavenger hunt:  The Great Greenville Race (GGR)!  Inspired partly by the CBS reality show, "The Amazing Race", GGR is full of fun, challenges, and unexpected twists you'll be sure to enjoy!"


"Explore the city with a team of friends in a scavenger hunt guaranteed to challenge you. You will have a blast as you try to beat the clock and other teams while searching for clues, solving puzzles, and cracking codes."

After a couple of messages back and forth with Lindsay, I pulled the trigger on the deal and for the next couple of weeks, we were looking for two more players to complete our team.

Meet the "Awesome Blossoms"!

I won't go into much details concerning how the scavenger hunt is set-up, because they have another event coming up this Saturday (Aug 6th and it's sold out!), but will give you the basic idea:

At the start point, you'll get an envelope with questions and you'll have to figure out where to find the answers to those questions. Once you have all questions answered correctly at that location, you get a new sheet of paper with instructions on how to find your next location and that goes on and on and on until you find the finish line. On the way, there are a couple of activities sprinkled in, if you can't complete the activities or answer all questions correctly, you'll have a time penalty (don't get the next clue until time is up). Oh and don't forget to try to answer the bonus questions, because you can earn a time bonus with those!

While physical fitness is not a pre-requisite to complete the race, it's certainly no disadvantage. We all wore running shoes and speed walked/ jogged the longer distances between locations... It was good for something: Our finish time combined with the time bonus from the bonus question got us the 2nd place. Wahooooo! ;-) The finish time was around 2 hours and with our bonus points, we got down to 1h 47m. 2nd place got us a medal and four cupcakes at the Chocolate Moose -> YUM!

We had a ton of fun out there, but the heat was really bad and we were spent by the time we reached the finish line. Ha... And I thought that this "race" wouldn't be physically demanding... Yeah right! I was toast!! (Maybe the 8 miles that I ran earlier that morning had something to do with that too!)

Overall this event is a great idea and I think Greenville downtown just has the right size to put something like this together without making it an all day affair. I would definitely recommend this to anyone, who looks for a little adventure and a fun activity for a group of friends or a family!

They also offer the Great Greenville Hunt, which is supposedly less strenuous than the races. The next event date is still to be determined.