My brain hurts from leg 6

Okay...so let me just preface this post by saying...I am not a math whiz, never have been, never will be, and just because I have worked at a statistics company for 11 years doesn't mean I have learned math any better. With that said...this leg was about MATH!!!

So we had to run around campus counting things like the number of stone steps to the sidewalk, or lights around a piece of artwork, letters in a stinkin' paragraph on a picture on a wall, or wall plaques in a trophy case. We had the list of items to count and where we needed to count them...so instead of back tracking we decided to to just make our way in order of the buildings we had to go in. We get to the pool and we were done counting and luckily no other teams were in there so we sat down where it was quiet to try and concentrate on the puzzle. Really? My head hurt!! At first we started trying to match the numbers with the letters of the alphabet because we had a key that a 1 = A and so on down the alphabet. There were four words we had to decode. We weren't really paying attention to the spaces and commas and we were just trying to match up number for letter. Anyone know what BAAHGC spells? Yeah...neither did we. Can you see why my head hurt? Another team came in so we decided to work together. As it turns outs we needed to pay attention to those spaces and commas, but they did indeed actually spell out real words, not just jumbled letters.

Turns out we had to run to the UARGE TREE NEAR DEER. We have a piece of art here on campus that looks like deer running. We did not go spooking any real deer. Of course we all thought it was a typo cause lets' face it, that's not the first typo we've seen on this race ( love ya Dom). Turns out it wasn't a typo...one of our fellow racers discovered that UARGE is a type of tree....although it was still LARGE. :-)  Which by the way, I have tried to Google UARGE TREE and it keeps asking me..."did you mean LARGE TREE"? Pretty funny...you can see our confusion

Anyway so once we get the UARGE or LARGE tree there is a clue here for a detour. We have to choose Cotton or Candy. The team we were with chose Cotton and was closer to where we were, my teammate wasn't sure what we were going to have to do so she wanted to do Candy as she thought it might be easier. We get to the Candy detour and we have to take a straw and suck an M&M and keep it on the end of our straw, walk over to the window where more cut up straws were taped to the ledge. We had to then balance that M&M (assuming we still had it on the straw) on the end of the straw that  was taped to the ledge. We had to get six of these. Now...let us not forget that we have already been running all over campus and can barely breath as it is. Now you are telling us we have to suck in and hold it til we get across the room? Needless to say it took us a while to get the hang of it. There were lots of M&Ms dropped on the floor.

We ended up finishing 6th, but at least we moved up from 11th from the last leg. And had we been good at math or puzzles we could have probably been higher. We actually thought we were dead last so we were really shocked to come in as high as we actually did.

We'll get back up to the top 4 in leg 7!!