Questival

While I was living in Uganda last year Cotopaxi held their first Questival event in Salt Lake City. I had a few friends participate and was overwhelmed with all of their facebook and instagram posts (just like everyone else). My friends Emilee, Summer, and Lizzie actually won the entire contest and got to go on a trip to Ecuador. I logged it away as something I would want to do if ever given the chance. I didn't know they were going to do it in SLC again until about a month before the race and thus hurriedly enlisted all my best pals/people I knew would be as in to the race as I was. Team "Live Llama and Prosper" was born!

Sidenote: Questival is a social adventure race. You're given 24 hours and a list of 300 challenges. The goal is to complete as many challenges as possible in the time frame while still maintaining creativity. Challenges fell across a broad spectrum of categories involving food, teamwork, and the outdoors. The list was released 24 hours before the race began and we had that time to prepare and plan out how we would go about everything. 

Friday was one of the crazier days of my life. I had stayed up until 2 AM the night before with Shea planning out our route. That day I had  a lot of homework (and both jobs) to rush through. As 5:00 PM rolled around I was already exhausted. I remember thinking that I didn't know how I was supposed to get through another 24 hours not sleeping.

From the moment we arrived at the kickoff event to 24 hours later we were doing something. My phone was always in my hand, along with the list of challenges we were supposed to be doing at that moment. The entire goal was to stay in the top 50. You could see what place you were in through the judging app. As teams submitted challenges their ranking would move up or down, depending on how many they had done and if people were voting for their photos or not. We stayed in the top 20 for the first 24 hours and moved down to the top 50 for the last half of the race. Keep in mind that there were 500 teams participating, so it was quite the feat to stay within the top 50.

I didn't end up getting a chance to sleep at all the entire race. There was a moment were I closed my eyes in the back seat as we drove to Logan, but past that I really didn't have a break. It was a top ten day for me as we worked our way around the state of Utah. The best part was being with my pals. We had some hilarious moments together. All of it was captured via the Cotopaxi Questival App. Link to our teams page HERE

Some of my favorite moments

• Wakeboarding on Utah Lake
• Throwing a Pie in Eric's face
• Yodeling at the top of my lungs in a public place
• Performing Street Magic
• Sharing a bag of donuts with a policeman
• Hiking to the Wind Caves in Logan Canyon
• Getting Tyler Hawes to re-tweet our team
• Doing the Ellen Dance Dare in the Library
• Watching the sunrise in Idaho

Some of my more cringe-worthy moments

• Eating three beatles
• Jumping into Logan Canyon River with my clothes on (ICE COLD) 
• Eating an entire can of wet cat food with my team
• Hiking to the Wind Caves/running down with my bad knee
• Crashing a wedding at the Logan temple
• Eating nothing because we didn't have time. But then we did eat it was the crap food for all the challenges. SO MANY DONUTS AND PIZZA AND ICE CREAM. 
• Accidentally forgetting to film while Shea ate the worm... and telling her that she had to eat another one. Whoops. 
• Freezing at the State Capital at 3 AM while singing the Utah State Song
• Stumbling into a very formal choir concert while dressed in our gear. SO MANY rude looks. 

VERY FAVORITE MOMENT

• Making THIS Music Video 

We ended up placing 19th out of 498 teams. It was definitely a day I will never forget and would do all over again if I could. Also, I slept for what felt like a week after it all ended. I have never been more tired.