A St. Albert duo used their brains and brawn to conquer Canada’s largest urban adventure.
Thomas Brown and James Dean passed the mental and physical tests of the recent GoodLife Fitness City Chase National Championships, presented by Marshalls, at Niagara Falls in time of 14 hours and 18 minutes.
“It’s definitely a good mix of both,” said Dean of the unique challenge of wits and athletic ability.
“It’s a two-day amazing race in one specific location and it’s part scavenger hunt and part obstacle course. There is no use of vehicles. We were on bikes or running that whole time. We covered 60 kilometres on bike and probably about 30 by running over that time period and it was in the general greater Niagara Falls region area.”
The sixth City Chase victory and the first since 2014 for Dean in eight nationals, including two second-place results, was the best of the bunch.
“It was exciting just because my teammate, Thomas, had never raced City Chase until this year,” said Dean of the Mud Sweat & Tears pairing, runners-up in the national qualifier at Edmonton by a few minutes behind the Pelletier twins, Daniel and Pierre.
“He heard about it lots just because we’ve know each other for 10 years so he is kind of a rookie, but he is very fit and very open minded and a thinker,” Dean added. “It was pretty fun because a lot of the stuff was new to him.”
Brown, 26, was blown away by the experience.
“It’s pretty awesome. It was the hardest and most fun 15 hours of my entire life,” said the St. Albert Catholic High School alumnus. “The whole race from start to finish was fun. Everything we did the whole time was something new and something challenging. It was something that I personally never thought I would be able to get to do, like fly an airplane, so it was just exhilarating but also it was extremely challenging. We had to run a lot and we had to bike pretty far.
“It was pretty much non-stop for 15 hours.”
Brown and Dean arrived at the City Chase challenge after a red eye flight from Mexico, where they competed in the ITU sprint triathlon world championships on a Thursday morning in Cozumel, and arrived in Toronto at 7:30 a.m. Friday. They drove to Niagara Falls and did some reconnaissance work before taking a three-hour nap prior to the 4 p.m. start time for the 17 teams.
“Just to do the race was a pretty big challenge,” said Brown, the fourth-place finisher as the No. 1 Canadian in the 25 to 29 age group at one hour, one minute and 34 seconds in the 34 C heat at his fifth worlds.
Dean, 39, placed 49th in the 35 to 39 age group at 1:08:24 as the 10th highest Canadian.
The founder of the St. Albert Physical Therapy & Sport Injury Clinic in Tudor Glen in 2001, which has since been rebranded as Active Physio Works, is also an avid Ironman, marathon and Olympic-distance triathlon racer.
The first of a series of 20 Chase Points in the event featured five tricky clues in five different languages at the Marineland theme park and after completing all five assignments Friday, Brown and Dean were third ranked.
That night the teams gathered for a steak dinner and an auction to bid on a wide-range of items that could be used or required in the race.
“You bid using time,” Dean said. “You’re not allowed to start with anything but what you had bid for.”
Day two started at 5:30 a.m. Saturday with Brown and Dean one minute behind the leaders with 19 Chase Points remaining.
“Right at the start we had to run around Niagara on the Lake and find these four points to get clues where we could go and get a bike. That was really difficult because it was like running around blind. We didn’t really know where we were going,” Brown said.
The fourth Chase Point involved an interesting activity at the St. Catharines Flying Club.
“We had to sit down and watch a 12-minute video on how to safety check an airplane pre-flight and then they marked us on our accuracy of doing the safety check. After that we figured we were done but they said no you’re hopping in and you’re going to fly the airplane so we said OK that’s kind of cool. We had a pilot instructor with us and none of us had ever flown an airplane before. He was showing us how to steer it on the runway and get it going and then in the air he said I’m going to mark you on two tasks and it’s taking the plane out of a spinning dive and taking it out of a stall and it has to be stalled for at least two seconds. I said you’re joking, right? And he said no,” Dean said.
“Thomas was the one flying the airplane and he did a fantastic job. The pilot never had to hold on to the steering or anything. I was in the back holding onto anything I could. I was pretty freaked out. Even thinking about it now I get kind of butterflies in my chest. It was so scary but so cool that we did something like that.
“It was one of the most exhilarating Chase Points that I’ve ever done in any City Chase race, including world championships.”
Brown agreed. “It was far the neatest experience of the whole race. I would say it was the most challenging.”
Dean estimated they were “relatively in the lead or sharing the lead pretty much for the whole race until about three or 3:30 o’clock on Saturday.”
Brown, however, stressed, “We never had it in the bag.”
At the auction, Ryan Schafer and Jon Carston (#bestmen) of Calgary bid on a blue shell from Nintendo’s Mario Cart and used that to jump ahead of Blood Sweat & Tears at the No. 11 Chase Point activity.
“They dropped the blue shell, which is a penalty only for the team in first place, so at 3:30 we got a 10-minute penalty. We were up on them by about eight minutes and they passed us so they had a two minute lead on us at that point and then after that they slowly drifted away from us and getting further and further ahead. They built up a half-hour lead on us by about eight o’clock,” Dean said.
The second-last Chase Point determined the final outcome.
“You could choose between a really hard puzzle or you could take a chip and run over to the casino and try and triple your money at roulette,” Brown said.
“It was a little bit of a time thing but you’re also testing your luck. In the end we decided to do that instead of take a chance at luck,” added Dean of the “cool circuit game and it was level 25, so the most difficult level of it.”
At that point in the race, Brown estimated they trailed the front-runners, Matt Strichland and David Crane (The Three Hour Tour) of Toronto, by about 30 minutes.
“They had tried to solve this puzzle for 10 minutes and couldn’t get it,” Brown said. “We were doing the puzzle when (the Toronto team) come running into the room, grabbed a $10 chip and ran back out so we knew at that point it wasn’t over.
“We were able to finish the puzzle and it was really exhilarating because once you finished the puzzle it lit up and made all this noise and at that point I knew we were ahead of them because they had just run off with another chip (for the eighth time) to go to the casino.”
The last Chase Point was running up 34 flights of stairs to the Myst Lounge in the Niagara Falls Fallsview Hilton Hotel.
“I was ready to pass out. It was like nine hours without food at that point and once we got up those 34 flights of stairs to the top we saw the trophy and the guy there said ‘OK, you don’t have to run anymore,’” said Brown of finishing 19 minutes ahead of the Toronto pair, which hit their win on the roulette table on the 10th attempt, and 55 minutes in front of the Calgary team.
Among the winnings for Mud Sweat & Tears were $1,000 gift certificates to Marshalls and the satisfaction of going the distance with the fastest time.
“All in all it was totally worth it and just tons of fun,” Brown said.
