Some of you were there, and a few others too. Let's see, we had people from County Down in Northern Ireland, Norway (by way of Tampa, admittedly), Ohio (another 'foreign' country), and Jerry & Ruthie Sirmans had a niece and nephew in from Georgia. I told them if we'd known there would be so many from outside FL, we'd have made the courses a lot tougher. They didn't think that was very funny.
An average-ish turnout of 148, or so. I'm still waiting for Ron Eaglin's results to be posted. Here it is Monday morning and he has nothing on the web site yet.
Slacker.
I'm kidding him, of course. But he spoiled us all last time when he had the results of a Saturday event up Monday morning. I don't honestly expect that to happen very often.
You'll read all the results (elsewhere) in the newsletter.
Ron and I had as much fun putting the red course together, as the competitors had running it, though most folks wisely chose not to literally run it. Among those who did, however, was Arild Orslie, whose time I thought I saw as 61 minutes on the 6.5 KM course, and he had never competed there before. Wow! The whole first 3km on Red was in the open (hot, sunny) fields. I didn't dare tell my daughter Kate about that beforehand or she may not have attended. Weather was great, but warm. Hot, some might say. Maxed at about 90F, as I recall. The river bottomland was dry as promised. I had to really try to find some water to slosh through; found some barbed wire, too. For all who are continually frustrated by navigation through the Shiggy Flats, you are really going to appreciate the more accurate updates to the map, recently completed by Malcolm Adams. I have proofs in hand, and I should have reviewed them before I went back out there myself.
The next time we go to LBE, we will start at the Geneva Wilderness Area about 2 miles further up the road from the Barr Street entrance, and from which you will all see a whole new map. It'll be great, the weather will be cooler, and we'll advertise it as a USOF Class "B" event, which will mean that your course copying from the master map will be 'on the clock'.
Anyway, Ron designed the Red course by planning at the desk, then running around it and looking at the control sites and said he did it in 63 minutes. So I did it with ribbon to mark the control locations and did it in 64 minutes. So then the evening before the event, Ron set the controls, including one extra Green course control, by running it in order and did it in 58 minutes. Not to be outdone, I tried retrieving Red/Green at the end of the day, and I was sure I'd done it in under 58 minutes, but they had all gone home when I finished. Talk about lonely. And I had these great excuses ready in case I couldn't actually beat 58 minutes: like, how 10+ controls get heavy on the arm while you're trying to run in 90F heat.
But much fun was had by all. Thoroughly positive comments from everyone, especially all the new people and even the ones who became a little lost. The short course was described as a combined White/Yellow, simply because we're running our of control sites, and routes in that area for the short courses. No one seemed to mind. The orange course was a fairly easy orange, as these things go, and the true test of it's success was that no one (or very few - check the results) DNF'd. We like to see that.
We also learned something new about teaching first-timers. One of our new groups had dutifully copied the course's control circles plus the added horse trails. The horse trails were not on the original map, so we drew them on the masters using the same red ink as for controls, completing only those parts of the horse trail in the general area of their course. Janet and I encountered them later out on the course, heading off on that trail, away from their course. So I ran over to get them un-lost. It turns out they were deliberately following that horse trial as drawn on the master, wondering why in the world we were making them go way out there when their controls were off in the other direction. Because we'd made them copy the trail, they assumed we meant they had to follow the trail. Next time, we'll explain all that better, just as we must explain how we don't expect them to follow the straight lines drawn between controls, but that they are included simply for easy reference. Live & learn.
Some experienced Oviedo and Titusville JROTC'ers were out, as well as a new JROTC group, who were terrifically excited by it all and will be sure to be back.
Good crowd, good time, good weather. Hope to see you all at the next event.