Emerging from the weeds

So after countless hours of matching finish times to pictures I keyed in my last set of times yesterday.  Flipping through the roughly 10,000 pictures allowed us to capture/verify over 1800 finish times.  The process was not perfect as there were some people whose bibs were not visible to the camera as they crossed the line.  Last night I posted the updated results with an email that instructed runners that did not show up because of an invisible bib to review the finish line video to find themselves and their time, which I could then verify with the pictures.

The posting of the results brought another onslaught of emails from people that either did not read the email in it’s entirety or did not understand what it meant.  Despite what I thought were pretty clear explanations, some people did not understand that the problem we experienced meant there would be no chip start times for the race.  I also had to resume my official race apologist role as I addressed comments posted on the race Facebook page.  I tried to use the same approach  as I did with the timing snafu, just honest answers.

Tonight I will be posting another set of results which will include any of the additions that come in.  We will then use those results as “official” and distribute the age group awards that were not able to be handed out on race day. I have continued to receive mostly positive feedback in response to my effort to remedy the timing problems and it somehow made the hours of data entry feel slightly less arduous.

I am hoping within a day or two things have settled down and I can take a nice deep sigh.  It won’t last for long however as Ali’s race is in 10 days which brings it’s own set of challenges along with it.