The weekend of May 13-14 kicked off of the W.E.ROCK rock crawling competition, Eastern series, in Dayton, Tennessee. This event was run Friday and Saturday night, so we left Ohio on Thursday and arrived in Dayton around 8pm. On Friday, we looked the Jeep over one last time and went through tech inspection. We drew a number 10 for the running order and that put us in the middle of the pack.

I have a new spotter this year, Jason Layne, so we were sure to walk the courses and talk over our strategy before the competition started. Of course, strategy always seems to go out the window when you follow someone who tears up the course or weather comes into play.

The courses for this weekend were very tough. For the whole weekend, we finished one course! I think the entire stock mod class only finished one, maybe two courses. We got the short end of the stick on the one course everyone else finished, so that hurt us. The judge told us we ran out of time, but it didn’t seem like 10 minutes yet. Since we also had a video camera, we watched it and looked at the time. We were stopped at 7:24 (we get 10 minutes to finish a course). So we had proof that we had time left, but it’s not in the rules to allow any outside timing devices to decide on time, so that was that and we were done. We were very upset and felt ripped off, but what could we do? We had one more course left after this one, so our plan was to go all in. We made it to the last set of cones and timed out.