Mid-Atlantic MedWAR

The Mid-Atlantic Medical Adventure Race (MedWAR) was yesterday in Newport News, Virginia. It was AWESOME! This race is an orienteering, mountain biking, canoeing adventure with medical questions and scenarios to test participant wilderness medicine knowledge. Hunter Winegarner, Eric Balent and I, amiably named Team McLovin, camped out the night before at the park. Luckily, right as we got into our tents it started to rain. Whew!

The next day we woke up a little later than we should have and hurried to the start of the race with barely enough time to get all our gear together. We headed out at an easy pace for the race and had a good time along the way. Our problems began when we ran into a little old lady on the trail who had fallen and was barely conscious. We took care of her pretty well, but got penalized 10 minutes for each error we made in medical management. In this case, they added 20 minutes to our time: 10 minutes for not making a fire and another 10 for not giving her anything to drink. Oh well, at least we saved her life.

Everything went pretty well after that, except for the random gear check that also added another 30 or more minutes on our time because we didn’t have spare clothes, flashlights for everyone, water purification methods and some other random stuff. Granted they told us this was all required equipment, but we thought that meant we only needed to have it if we wanted to carry it with us during the race. So, we decided to leave all that gear in the car. Oops!

At one point we were told there was gunfire and we took cover. I immediately returned fire and the assailant ran off. Good Army training at its best. The bad part was that Hunter got shot and we had to fix his pneumothorax (hole in his chest) or he would have died. Close call, but Eric and I bandaged him up like champs and he finished the race with his one good lung.

In the end, we did pretty well. We didn’t come in first, but we did finish. Go Team McLovin! There were six teams that participated from my school, and only one of them got lost. I’ll post the results when they are ready.

Here's the website for your viewing pleasure: http://www.medwar.org/midatlantic/index.htm
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In the end, Team McLovin got 19th place, due to some nasty penalties. Not as hot as we had hoped, but USUHS CMA (Christian Medical Association, Eric Grenier, Frank Rubio and Nate Hathaway) got First Place! Yee Haw! Go USUHS! Here is a link to the race results: http://www.medwar.org/midatlantic/results/MA08results.htm

And some other links about the race: http://www.dailypress.com/news/local/newport_news/dp-local_race_0406apr06,0,53180.story

http://www.dailypress.com/news/local/newport_news/dp-adventurerace,0,4567388.photogallery