ziplining in the dark

Last summer I did a glow-themed night 5k at Camp Dearborn and it was wonderful - not only did it feel great to run at night when it was a little cooler, but the environment at the park was fabulous. Campers with glow necklaces and sparklers say outside of their trailers with Christmas lights strung along them and cheered us on as we did two laps around the gorgeous evening scenery & I PRed my 5k time by over a minute!

The point of the story is that a bunch of friends and I have been talking about going to Adventure Park ropes course & ziplining for a long time & last Friday they were having a special "glow night", I remembered how fabulous that run was, and we were sold.

Suited up and ready to go (we thought).

Adventure Park calls itself an "aerial forest park," which is actually a pretty apt description. The park has 20 different "trails" of platforms in the trees connected by various arrangements of ropes, cables, wood and ziplines that form bridges between platforms. It all looks like a fun easy romp through an obstacle course, but IT IS NOT.

Coworker bonding time!

Being the badasses we are, after getting
our harnesses and going through the safety briefing, we decided immediately to start with the mid-level course, which put us 10 feet up in the air to begin and lulled us into an incredibly false sense of security about degree of difficulty. Fresh off of some pretty basic (though challenging) rope bridges & some awesome ziplines through the trees, we decided to conquer the next harder course (actually we tried to skip to an even harder one, but were chastised by some employees).

The second course took me and two of my brave friends 20 feet up in the air and began with a deceptively easy bridge, ladder, and zipline...and then immediately went crazy. Let me tell you, being short is NOT an advantage at a ropes course. At one point I got tangled up between my cable clips and the cables holding the platform up, swaying back and forth 20 feet above the ground and 10 feet away from a platform, had to back up to right the situation and finish crossing super awkwardly and oh yeah, the park lights died right in the middle of all this!! My lucky friends were safely back on the previous platform, as only one person is allowed on an obstacle at a time, while I clung for dear life to a tiny cable and inched my way forward until I finally made it to the next platform (but not before two more mini light failures!).

We did all (well, the six of us who opted to try it) make it through the blue course & were rewarded with a 20-foot free jump/repel at the end - once you convinced yourself it was okay to jump off of a platform that high off the ground into the pitch black, it was a grand old time.

I opted to leave my phone in my car (because I definitely saw myself dropping it from 20 feet up and being faced with hundreds of dollars in replacement fees), but we did grab a couple pictures as we were walking around before it got dark out.

We never made it to those impossible looking triangles, but we'll get you next time, double black!!

At times the course felt like it was never going to end, and I found myself dreading the next obstacle - but my friends & I pushed each other to finish, and honestly despite how I felt at the time, the adrenaline rush was amazing, and it was a really cool experience to find new ways to push my body's limits. It was crazy how much of the challenge was all mental - the biggest challenge of all was having to force your mind to override when your body says no.   It was so easy to forget that when you jumped on a platform onto the zipline, you'd be sitting in your harness - the whole time my brain was screaming at me that there was nooooo way I had the upper body strength to hang on for the whole length of the rope.  But in retrospect, I had so much fun!  We're all still talking about the trials and tribulations of the zipline, and planning to go back and conquer the black and double black courses. And, to top it off, it was a serious no joke upper body workout. I was feeling it for days!!

(And of course, afterwards we chose to reward our weary bodies with a pineapple/feta/jalapeno pizza and a night of watching Little Shop of Horrors like the bunch of nerds we are - so all is well that ends well.)