Editor’s note: This story was initially published on Dec.9. The original content in this story has been edited by the editorial board for accuracy. We appreciate our readers for keeping our staff transparent and accountable.
Four of McIntosh High School’s teachers and former McIntosh SRO are doing more than teaching lessons this year – together, they’re competing in Warrior Adventure Racing, traversing hard and long trails on foot, bike and kayak to make it to multiple checkpoints along the way.
Science teachers and couple Adam and Melissa Holt, and Danielle Okamoto, along with Social Studies teacher Chris Judy and former McIntosh School Resource Officer (SRO) Corporal Keith Isaac make up “Trail Mix.”
Each member approached the race with a goal in mind ranging from wanting to see how far they could push themselves to completing their first ever teamed competitional race.
Holt was looking to see how far he can push himself and see how their team fares with the challenge.
“I’m just looking forward to seeing what I’m made of and seeing what our team is made of,” Holt said.
On Sept. 20, Team Trail Mix competed in the BEAR (Blairsville Extreme Adventure Race) to test themselves, see what they can do and for some it’s to live a dream they’ve had for years. The BEAR race is an outdoor race like the name suggests, it entails mountain biking, canoeing and hiking; the contestants have to make it to different checkpoints through the wild and they get a point for each checkpoint. The organization running the event have a link to be able to track the runners.
All of them were looking to see how far they could push themselves to finish this race and just not come last.
“Crossing that finish line and not being the last team to do it,” Okamoto said.
These five trained for a few weeks and they learned a bit about themselves and how they needed to be during the event to be able to finish and not earn a DNF (“Did Not Finish”). They learned how to work around their own weaknesses and rely on their teammates strength to pass different parts of the race.
For some of the five, it was harder to learn to work with others, and for the others it was like walking down memory lane.
“I’ve never done competitions with a team,” Okamoto said.
For Judy who has a military background, helping his team find their paths and make their way through the challenge while also facing age-related challenges.
“I think the big thing is, I know I could do it since it’s kind of easy as far as, like, mentally. Sometimes these distances seem scary, like when we tell people, ‘Oh y’all are crazy’ but [it,] doesn’t seem that bad to me. But the struggle that I have is now that I’m older, I’m not 20 years old anymore, so it’s a lot harder to recover, a lot harder to train. Especially having like a wife and kids. It’s harder to actually get the training time that I want because of my family schedule.” Judy said.
“I know I could do it since it’s kind of easy as far as mentally. Sometimes these distances seem scary, like when we tell people, ‘Like oh y’all are crazy’ but [it] doesn’t seem that bad to me. But the struggle that I have is now that I’m not 20 years old anymore and so it’s a lot harder to recover, a lot harder to train especially having a wife and kids. It’s hard to get training time that I want because of my family schedule,” he said.
Holt, on the other hand, has done several 5k’s before, but nothing to the level of the B.E.A.R.
“[I’ve done] some 5k’s, that’s it; never anything to this level,” Holt said.
The team had a challenge with reading the maps to find their route.
“The hardest part I’m going to say, was the maps first. So it wasn’t just one map that you followed the whole time, it was multiple maps, and each map was a different scale and oriented in a different direction. So on some maps, North was the top, South was the bottom. On some other maps North was the right, or North was the left and then it was very confusing,” Holt said.
Students noted that their teachers had taken part in a challenging race and were surprised to see their teachers being capable of mixing two very different lives together so well.
“I was surprised that [Adam Holt] could make time to do such a time consuming race whilst still being able to teach and train for the race,” Avery Cole (11) said.
