Racing for fun and experience

By SCOTT DIETRICH

Conestoga event management students in their final semester are getting the chance to finally take everything they have learned and apply it to the real world.

One of their final assignments is to work in groups to hold an event for their classmates or the general public.

One group took their love of athletics and a television show and turned it into a competition.

On March 22, Sara Moreira, Jade Sammons, Kailey Esbaugh and Prathamesh Shetty held an event in uptown Waterloo called the Amazing Race Waterloo.

“We were all very athletic people so we wanted to do something active,” Esbaugh said.

“We thought about doing something in the gym but then we wanted to do something like a competition so we settled on the Amazing Race.”

The competition pitted anyone who was willing to race in the cold, and get up early on a Saturday morning, against each other.

In all 34 people (17 teams of two) raced around uptown Waterloo, getting around by any means necessary.

They faced such challenges as eating four of the hottest wings in town at Morty’s Pub, devouring a litre of frozen yogurt, attempting a session of hot yoga and solving a series of challenging clues.

The event was entirely student-run, from marketing to finances.

Esbaugh said it was a fantastic experience for the students, who are getting the chance to apply what they have learned for the first time.

“It puts the responsibility on us,” Esbaugh said, adding, “We pay for the event. We are in charge of marketing so if the event is a flop then it’s all on us.”

Scott McGuire and Brandon Death took home the top prize, a gift basket that included new iPod shuffles and other prizes.

They competed under the team name of Victorious Secret, and had the fastest time, finishing the race in three hours and 25 minutes.

McGuire said when all was said and done, it was the wing challenge that ended up being the hardest part of the competition.

“Those wings were awful,” McGuire said. “The hot yoga was hard sure, but there was a lot of pain after eating those wings.”

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