“Amazing Race” team buildings are very hard to pull off. It hinges on the ability of the organizing committee to (1) set specific rules, (2) come up with interesting clues and challenges and (3) execute the race properly. Do it right and you end up with a budget friendly event where everybody enjoys, camaraderie is built and people fill their Facebook pages with photos from the race. Mess it up and it’s a disaster, like when I told Jaye we don’t need to read the manual to install our home theater system.
Not familiar with Amazing Race? It’s a TV reality show where teams are given clues to reach specific places anywhere on the globe. When they reach that place, they need to complete a challenge before they can get the clue to the next place (or they get the clue outright). It goes on and on until they get the final clue to the final destination. First team to reach the finish line wins. Easy right?
In this version of Amazing Race, the committee decided to have a race around downtown Chicago… literally. The stops were purposely set at the north, east, south and west sides of Chicago.
I was assigned to be a member of the organizing committee because of my familiarity with the city, my familiarity with the Amazing Race series, my ability to come up with clever clues and well, I couldn’t join the race with a bum knee so it wasn’t really much of a choice.
Wait, didn’t I already resign from the company last year?
Actually, they made Jaye an organizer then she pulled that puss in boots big eyes look at me to help out (and I could never say no to that).
Since we live on the north end of Chicago, we were assigned the Lincoln Park area. I had to create a clue going to Lincoln Park and a challenge that they need to complete while at Lincoln Park.
Lincoln Park is a huge park that has a zoo in it. Admission is free, the place is packed during weekends and it has lots of information available inside. This was the clue I made for the teams to reach Lincoln Park:
Ulysses S. GRANT was a military commander during the US Civil War and the 18th President of the United States.
Find the statue of GRANT riding a horse in a PARK. This was created by Louis Rebisso in 1891 and currently overlooks Cannon Drive
Why the curveball clue? Amazing Race rewards the team who picks the most efficient way of solving clues and challenges. Each team was not allowed a phone or an iPod but they can ask strangers for information. True enough, the team that reached Lincoln Park first did so by asking a bus driver where Cannon drive was and asked him to take them there. If you want to answer it THAT badly, there’s always a way.
The challenge in the park Jaye and l concocted was better. Again, I wanted one that can be done by brute force but can be done really fast if you strategize properly. Once they arrive at the Grant Statue in Lincoln Park, each team was given a table that had 10 animals with their habitat, range, diet, weight and offspring. Some of the boxes were empty and they need to fill in the blanks.
Oh, and we only gave the scientific names (they need to figure out the common name).
… oh, and each team needs to take a picture of everyone with the animal.
Each animal habitat in the zoo had a placard that contained all these information. The brute force way was to go around the zoo and look for the scientific names then once found, you can write down the information and take the picture. If you do that, we estimated them to complete it in an hour. Jaye did the challenge before the actual race to test it and she finished hers in 30 minutes.
The strategic way was to engage the information desk and/or the information people. They can translate the scientific names to common names, grab a zoo map within the park and waltz to each habitat.
They can also split up temporarily so they can cover more ground and once found, they can meet up again to take the picture.
In the end, three teams completed the challenge. One team bailed out early. One team bailed out at the last minute. The last team we begged to bail out since we were already at the park manning the Amazing Race carpet since 8:30am and at 3:00pm, they were still in the zoo.
Overall it was a fun experience but it would have been better if there were more people in the organizing teams. We needed more people to man more stations so teams can perform easier tasks but with more stops. Waiting for teams to arrive though was as boring as watching paint dry. In the end, the organizers were all drained since it was a very chilly day and Jaye is not built like a polar bear like I am. We had to skip lunch and only managed to survive on 200 bars of Quaker oatmeal bars. I had sore feet and sore legs from standing all day and the most exciting part was running back and forth to the bathroom to make sure no one arrives while you’re peeing.
One last thing (I didn’t want to end this entry with the word “peeing”), kudos to the other organizers who printed the clues and the envelopes. They look just like the real thing!
No comments:
Post a Comment