One last save, Scorched, 5k, bye Crackhead

Saturday morning after a very poor night of sleep Cindy and I drug ourselves out of bed at 4:30 for the last time for a running club event.  We got on site a little after 5:30 and started work on the start line mats immediately. Despite having cones and lights out we still had idiots that zoomed by us without even touching the brake pedal, unreal.  By the time we got back to the main registration area it was a little after 6.  One of the nice things about this race is it starts at 8AM, a half hour later than most of the club race start times.

So we got busy setting up the registration area and running power for various things that required it.  I had Chris helping me with paper registration entry.  Ever since we got the MyLaps equipment I can no longer do race day data entry due to the extra time requirements equipment set up now takes.

Laurie, who is slated to take over race timing responsibilities and myself hopped in the golf cart to get to the start line about 15 minutes ahead of the start time.  The start of this race is always problematic because of the dog involvement.  The congestion at the start leads to many tripping hazards as excited dogs inadvertently cut off people around them.  This year they tried to address it by lining up runners by expected race pace.  It didn’t seem to help much.

Because of the distance between the registration area and the start line there is always a huge number of people that don’t get to the start line on time.  As a result I am stuck at the start line waiting for as many as stragglers as possible to cross the timing mats so they get an accurate time.  The end result of all of this was me not getting back to the finish line until we were 8 minutes into the race, meaning I only had 8-10 minutes to make sure the finish line was up and running.

So runners started streaming across the finish and times were getting recorded.  I sat back and exhaled, the hard work was done and all that was left was to do a few result print outs and I was done, or so I thought.  At the finish line I normally have two timing boxes, one main box and a second one for back up, just in case.  The back up box is normally never needed because the MyLaps hardware is generally very reliable.  Well I noticed that I was accumulating more chip reads on the back up box than the main box which was odd.  At first I wrote this off as some runners that had already finished the race standing too close to the back up timing mats, causing them to get read again.  I asked those people to step back a few feet.

After printing out a set of finish results we started having some people coming up and telling us their times were wrong, off by a little more than 40 seconds.  We used the security dvr to watch footage as the first finisher crossed.  His time matched what we posted, as did the second finisher.  However when the third finisher crossed the video showed a time roughly 46 seconds faster than what was posted in the results.  WTF???

Over the years I have had situations where all runner times were off due to various issues.  This was the first time I ever just saw a few random people with a consistent time offset.  Through a hive mind collaboration between myself, Chris, and Laurie who were at the table with me we pieced together what happened.  I took a look at the raw data for one of the missed runners on each timing box.  It showed he had not been read on the main timing box but was read on the back up box.  Ok so it appears that any of the problem times were associated with runners that did not get read on the main box.

Laurie said it seemed like the time on the second box was off.  When I took a look at the box I saw we forgot to confirm the GPS time synch on it, meaning it’s internal clock was off by roughly 40 some seconds.  Now that I knew the issue I had to come up with a way to fix it.  The solution I came up with was to delete all of the race chip times and reimport the times, using only the back up box as a source.  In the timing software I was able to apply a 43 second time adjustment to all imported times which corrected all of the errors.  Whew, crisis averted, again.

This was a particularly challenging issue because it was two headed.  The problem with the main box, which after the race was determined to be a bad cable, was bad enough.  Having the time synch on the back up box wrong added another degree of complexity.  Nearly every race has some sort of hurdle that needs to be cleared, this just happened to be a pretty high one.  Having this occur on my last race timing for the club put a nice exclamation point on things.

It’s these sort of issues that are going to be particularly difficult for a novice race timer to address.  Not only do you have to be able to identify the source of the problem, you need to have the background knowledge to be able to logically arrive at a workaround for the issue, even if you have never seen it before, such as what happened Saturday.  I think there is a very bumpy road ahead for whomever assumes the timer responsibility.

The times problem put me into more of a focused haze than normal, meaning I really had no time to enjoy what makes the race so special, the dog participation.  I hardly saw or talked to anyone outside the people involved with the registration and timing parts of the race.  I heard later that everyone had a great time. It seems bizarre that I really couldn’t tell you much about the race outside of what was directly in front of me.

This race was special not only because it was the 10th year for the event but also because it was the first time the race has been held since Nicki died.  Evidently Ali said some touching words about Nicki on the PA which I unfortunately did not hear as I was in the midst of trouble shooting mode.  On the back of the event t-shirt there is a a line that dedicates the race to Nicki and will forever be in her memory.  It was both very touching and sad.

Our post race route was quite different than normal.  Instead of heading home we headed to a storage area for Laurie’s business where we dropped off all of the remaining club owned equipment.  It felt odd but refreshing at the same time to be passing the torch both figuratively and literally.  We have a whole lot more space in our spare bedroom now since I have housed running club equipment for close to a decade.

I did need to take the main timing laptop back home with me.  I used it to prepare and post my final set of results as the running club timer.  As you can imagine I have been asked a number of times how it feels to be stepping away from a role I have held for such a long time.  Of course the first reaction are words like relief and happiness.  When I announced that I was stepping away three months ago the eight events I had to plow through to get here seemed formidable.  Bearing this responsibility when your heart is no longer in it was not an easy thing.

Now that I punched my last time card I do feel that sense of relief I anticipated for so long.  Being free of the anxiety that surrounds this sort of gig is going to be very, very welcome.  Despite serving in the role that I did for so long I can’t totally get away from some feelings of guilt, as I know that in the end it is the race participants that could suffer from my absence.  They are devoid of responsibility for my decision so having them potentially be affected by it does not bring me good feelings.  All I can do is hope the club finds it’s way now that my hands have completely been pulled off the wheel.

Saturday afternoon we worked on a number of things that needed to be done.   Ali stopped by to pick up Sadie.  She actually hung around for a little bit and chatted with us which was very nice.  She was very happy about how the race went which was good to hear.

I had some ideas about going out to dinner and/or a movie Saturday night to celebrate timing my last club race.    Reality sunk in that we would be drop dead tired which would be counter to doing much celebrating.  We instead ordered a take out eggplant parm sub that we enjoyed as we watched Scorch Trials, my latest Netflix rental. I would describe the movie as long, confusing, and weird, only worthy of a B rating in my book.  Cindy rated it even lower.

On Sunday morning Cindy and I decided to do another track run, this time increasing our distance from 2 miles to 5K (3.12 miles)  The temps in the lower 60’s combined with overcast skies made for some good running weather.  I felt ok during the run however later in the day and to a degree this morning I am feeling some minor discomfort in the IT band area, the first I have felt in quite awhile.

We went straight from the run to running errands, stopping for coffee as well as Lowe’s and Costco.  At Lowe’s we got some more plants for the garden although my major intention was to get a dryer vent cover that I could re-purpose as a crude cover for the Ring doorbell I have mounted on the chicken coop run.  The vent cover will provide some degree of shade and precipitation protection for the device.

At Costco I picked up a LED garage light that was on sale.  The conventional florescent light I had in the garage had one bulb out, replacing it with an affordable and mercury free solution seemed like a good option.  I hung the new light which included cutting off the power plug and splicing it directly into the house wiring, a simple chore.  The new LED lights don’t have the warm up time the old bulbs suffered from and appear to be brighter overall.

Last night Cindy and I were passed out in bed at an incredibly early time of 8:30PM.  We both just felt exhausted.  Depsite the early bedtime I woke up this morning feeling not particularly rested due to restless sleep.  I can’t tell you the last time I fell asleep and the next thing I remembered was waking up with the alarm the next morning.  Instead my nights have been filled with sessions of waking up and then not being able to fall back asleep, sometimes for hours at a time.

I heard this morning that yet another Stern Show “whack packer” died recently, Crackhead Bob.  Bob (real name George), was a former crackhead that wound up suffering multiple strokes from his drug use.  The end result was an incredibly funny speech impediment that lead to many, many funny moments on the show.  Bob dropped off the show radar in 2007 when he moved to Texas.  He was only 56 when he died.  In the past year there have been a number of prominent whack packers that have kicked the bucket.  I suppose it is a sad reminder of the age of the show as well as a large segment of it’s loyal listener base.