To the brink and back, Now I didn’t see it, Slipped on the slackline, FU LogMeIn

Friday night after work I headed directly to the running store which was hosting packet pick up for Sunday’s Half Marathon until 7PM.  I brought an extra sweatshirt along since I planned to sit outside on the patio of TGIF’s to do my data entry, it was rather chilly with temps dropping through the 60’s. Packet pickup was steady but not horribly busy.  I was able to enter any paper entry forms on the spot so I wouldn’t have to mess around with them after I got back home.

On Saturday I planned to once again go to packet pick up but not until early afternoon, I had some stuff I wanted to get done around the house in the morning.  After getting the weeding done around the house Cindy helped me take down the outside Xmas decorations.  Originally I had ideas of leaving the lights up and on until the end of January like I did last year, but for whatever reason that idea no longer seemed like a good one.  The lights had been turned off a week ago.

Removing the lights required use of my extension ladder and extendable pool skimmer pole.  I was the primary remover, especially of anything above 7 or 8 feet high.  Cindy was the designated light wrapper, a role she excelled at.  After maybe an hours work the exterior of the house was officially undecorated.  Usually taking down Xmas lights will bring with it substantial feelings of melancholy for me.  There was some of that this year but not to the degree I have felt it in the past.

When I got back down to the running store I had a bunch of paper entries waiting for me.  It seems odd to me to wait until the day before a half marathon to sign up for it but if people are willing to lay down the extra dollars for their procrastination so be it.  There was a lot of complaining regarding the race shirts given out this year.

The race director decided to go with a different source for race shirts and it turned out to be a poor decision.  Not only were the shirts lesser quality than what runners had experienced in prior years they were sized HORRIBLY.  It almost seemed like the manufacturer mislabeled a truckload of shirts and sent them to us.  A small shirt was the size of a regular medium or even possibly a large shirt.  The medium shirts would pass for XL, it was pretty embarrassing. They also had absolutely no fit to them whatsoever, they seemed patterned after a potato sack.

Because the shirts were so mis-sized, tons of people were exchanging down in size from what they signed up for.  This started a chain reaction of bad things.  The monster shirts resulted in the smaller sizes, Xtra Small and Small being exhausted quickly.   This resulted in anyone that came to pick up their race packet after 2PM of having no choice but to receive at the smallest, a medium shirt (the size of a BIG large shirt).

Some people didn’t care but most of them were not happy and I didn’t blame them.   A 1/2 marathon race shirt is something that a lot of people want to wear with pride, as running 13.1 miles is a major accomplishment.  If you hand them a low quality, oversized, white shirt you are blemishing that opportunity as a crappy shirt is less likely to be worn.  As I said, I felt embarrassed to be handing runners these shirts but I had no choice.

There was a good turnout on Saturday, we started with 11 boxes of packets and were able to condense that down to 4 by days end which was my hope.  The less people that need to pick up stuff on race day, the better.

Once I got home from packet pick up I had to dive headfirst into final race prep which included printing, packing, loading and going over mental checklists repeatedly to make sure I had everything I needed for the race.  The forecast for race morning was quite cold with temps predicted in the low to mid 40’s. I decided to leave anything with a battery in it inside overnight so it wouldn’t have it’s capacity knocked down by the cold temps in the van.  We got to bed as early as possible, lights out around 9:30.

The ridiculously early 2:30 alarm was hated but necessary.  Not only did I have to load the remaining stuff on the van before heading out, Cindy had to to do prep for the race since she was volunteering AND running in it.  As I stepped outside to load the van the air felt quite cold as expected although the 4 layers I had up top and two on the bottom half of my body felt sufficient.

We got on site a little before 4AM.  I immediately dove into the long list of things that needed to get erected, dropped off, set up and configured.  The cold temps almost felt bearable because there was a lack of wind to push them against any exposed skin.

Pre-race set up went smoothly.  We had the registration area all set up and ready to rock well before the official 5:45AM open to race day registration.  Once runners started flowing in things were quite busy but flowing in an orderly manner.  We actually had 6 or 7 people walk up the morning of the race and plunk down $100 to participate, funny.

About 15 minutes before the race start I headed to the start line to set up the timing equipment.  Doing so with a couple thousand people mulling about is always interesting.  I had everything up and ready to go with about 5 minutes to go.  With a race this size it takes a loooong time until the last runner crosses the start mats, this year the last person hit the mats 3:30 after the start of the race.

So as soon as I was done at the start I had to head right to the finish line to get cracking.  Normally you would think roughly the hour I had before the first runner comes across would be plenty to get everything up and running at the finish.  Surprisingly I used almost every minute allocated to me.

You see this race has a TON of extra moving parts.  I set up two timing boxes for redundancy at the finish line and a third box that is used by the race announcer to call runner names as they head to the finish.  There is a lot of additional tweaking that needs to be done to make this happen plus I was running into technical glitches with one of the boxes.  Finally, with about 5 minutes to spare, I THOUGHT I had everything ready to roll.

So the race winner comes blazing down the road, crosses the announcer mats and no name pops up, just a code.  When the runner crosses my finish mats I see his time pop up but no name, wtf?  I hoped this was just a weird  anomaly, it wasn’t.  As subsequent runners came across the announcer was seeing nothing and I was seeing no names on their finish times.  Houston, we have a problem…a BIG problem.

I handed the handheld Time Machine to someone so they could hit the button each time a runner crossed so I would at least have some sort of times to reference if this was some sort of mega-disaster.  Of course my first thought was “oh shit, the biggest race of the year and I am not going to have results” but that quickly was shoved to the background, I needed to figure out what the fck was going on.

After doing some looking at runners in the system I noticed I only had timing chip id’s assigned to the first 2500 numbers.  That makes no sense, I individually scanned all 2750 timing chips to make a chip to bib mapping file.  I was sure after doing so I applied the new chip id’s to the race however what I was seeing showed I hadn’t.  What I realized was the race was loaded with the chips used in last year’s race, oh man…

Ok so now that I identified the problem, I had to figure out how to fix it.  I was scrambling to remember where I dumped the new chip file I created.  I looked on the laptop and even remote controlled to my server at home, looking to see if I put them there.  Finally after some frustrating memory failures, I found the files.  I had indeed forgot to apply them to this years race, great.

So after some mad scrambling I was able to apply the correct mapping file to both the announcers laptop and my timing laptop.  Finally, names were being associated with times after a VERY tense 20 minutes.

Our announcer did a good job of improvising while I was scrambling.  Since he had no runner info he simply stood by the finish line and acted like an amplified cheerleader, “Good job! Way to go! (whoever you are)”  The sigh of relief when I got everything back in order was quite large.  Rest assured that will never happen again.

To the runners that finished after the problem, things were status quo, in fact I don’t think many race participants even realized there was a problem at all since live results, although slightly delayed were flowing normally.  After that cluster fck, the rest of the event timing went smoothly.  The shoe timing chips we went back to this year, although slightly less convenient than race bib timing solutions, proved to be rock solid reliable.  I had hardly any racing time misses outside of a few missed start times, something quite impressive with an event this size.

For Cindy this was the first time she ever ran a stand alone 1/2 marathon.  She had covered the distance in her Half Ironman triathlon a year ago but never as a solo event.  She hadn’t been able to train as consistently or as hard as she would have liked to going into the race.  She was doubtful she could break the 2 hour mark, despite my assurances she could.

She proved me right, covering the distance in less than 1:56, only a minute slower than my best 1/2 marathon time.  Her levels of determination and competitiveness really shine through when it comes to race day.   It was a great run by her.

We didn’t get off site until way after 11.  Once I pulled into the driveway it was another 4 hours plus of working on race related items including an unexpectedly miserable job of emptying unused race packets.  We created 2700 packets for the race, we had roughly 2100 finishers.  That meant there were HUNDREDS of packets left.  Each packet had stuff in it that could be recycled or reused in the future, a timing chip, safety pins, twist ties and the 9×12 packet itself.  Cindy and I spent at least a couple hours alone dumping these out and sorting the contents.  I quickly discovered that paper hand outs, paper race bibs and feather light twist ties do not always come out of a packet easily.  It was pure drudgery.

On Sunday night I made the suggestion we watch my latest Netflix rental, Now You See Me, back in the bedroom.  Well considering we both had been up since 2:30 AM that was a pretty dumb idea.  I wound up dozing off for more of the movie than not.  However I think it was a good thing.

You know how speed readers say they only read parts of the page and are still able to get a decent comprehension of the material?  That was how this movie was.  Even with only seeing small chunks of it I could tell it was fcking stupid.  This was one of those movies that depicts the characters as just too clever and slick to be remotely believable, these geniuses would confuse Einstein.  At first I considered if I should re-watch the movie to see if my first impression was unfair.  I decided to go with my gut, it’s stupid. C rating.

I was quite thankful I had Monday off to recover from race weekend.  Cindy and I enjoyed a very laid back day that featured beautiful weather.  I went and picked up the dogs to enjoy the day with us since Ali had to work.  Enjoy it they did.  Both Nicki and Sadie seemed to love hanging outdoors as much as possible.

Cindy and I spent a lot of time on her slackline.  We both are getting better.  I actually made it all the way across without falling, a first.  We then moved it between two slightly further apart trees and I again was able to complete the entire span which surprised the shit out of me. Cindy completed the span as well several times but also did some impressive backwards walking and 180 degree turns on the line that I didn’t even consider attempting.

We both had some falls.  Cindy fell while I was recording, landing forcefully on her butt/lower back.  I fell off twice.  The first time landing on my knees in a less than pleasant way. My second fall was more serious and ended my slacklining for the day.  I slipped off the line and fell in a way that compressed my bad right knee much further than it will go on it’s own.  It was very similar to what I did coming off the 1/4 pipe obstacle at the Tough Mudder. When I first got up I had an awful limp that subsided after a few minutes but today that knee is swollen and stiff, great.

I’d like to say that I have a nice break from the stresses of race timing but this weekend I roll right into Ali’s Run for the Paws race which not only is our 2nd biggest 5K of the year, it’s also one of the most logistically challenging.

The start and finish line for the race are very far apart, making it extremely difficult for me to start the race and get the finish line up and running before the first runner arrives.  To assist me this year I plan to drive my truck to start line and use it to shuttle me back to the finish as quickly as possible.

This morning I got an EXTREMELY annoying email from LogMeIn, the providers of a free remote control solution I have used for nearly a decade.  The email said the free service level, which allowed you to handle up to 10 computers was being terminated IMMEDIATELY.  Yes as in ZERO notice.  In addition to the pay option being your only avenue they are only giving you the ability to control TWO computers for the base level of paid service.  What the fck?

This was total and utter bullshit and I have no idea what the deciders at the company were thinking.  I can understand wanting to move more people towards the pay model.  Perhaps further limit the free options of the product or if you are no longer offering a free version of the product, make the paid version able to at a minimum handle the same number of computers you could for free previously.  And of course, this change should have been announced with a lead time, allowing users of the product to evaluate other solutions if they were not interested in paying for LogMeIn.

Instead they did none of this.  From my perspective (and many others if you look at reaction on the net) this was almost a ransom attempt.  You pull the rug out from your free user base with no notice and then tell them their only option is to fork over cash for a decreased level of service, what a brilliant marketing plan.  Did they not see what happened to Netflix?

So anyway, I will be among the thousands jumping ship from LogMeIn probably heading over to TeamViewer, another remote control product that is free for personal use.

I would be highly surprised if within a short time LogMeIn doesn’t reverse direction (Woops we’re sorry for being assholes) and step back from their initial stupid plans to something more moderate.  Unfortunately a huge chunk of their user base will have already sailed off, never to return again, including myself.