The final Thomass Caledon is in the books. We had perfect winter weather - sunshine and a good amount of snow. Last night's gusty winds died down at breakfast time, thankfully.
We had a couple of big glitches and a lot of small ones that hopefully stayed behind the scenes but kept the volunteers hopping. The big glitches were that two SI unit batteries apparently failed between yesterday (when they were all tested) and today. Unfortunately, one was the Finish unit so it's going to take some detective work to get a set of results. We know the sequence of arrival of the competitors and we have some of their times. We know the time of the last control before the finish, of course, and it wasn't that far away.
I see that many racers set a stopwatch to time their race. If you did, please e-mail me the time you measured for yourself. We'll take that info into account along with the other info we have.
That's the sort of thing you wish wouldn't happen but it's not in our control. The glitch I'm more bummed about is that control #2 was hung at a control location from the first version of the course (where a ribbon had been hung awhile ago). Luckily, it was in a fairly visible location and not too far from the new location but it was wrong and caused confusion. What's amazing is that Keith and I visited it several times in recent days - and so did an independent course vetter from another club. By that stage, the organizers aren't looking closely at the map anymore so it's easy to fool us. Major lesson learned. Apologies to people affected. (Naturally, this was one of the controls whose battery died - just to add insult to injury once people got there.)
Congrats to Hammer on taking the win, closely pursued by Getawaystix. It was an exciting finish, with or without a finish control.
It was great having Pat-hetic here to provide a half-day of his Adventure Running Kids program. Parents and kids were full of enthusiasm about ARK Snow Day. They seemed to have an excellent time.
It was great to see so many friends although I didn't have much time to chat this time around. Looking forward to racing in the next Thomass! And hoping that winter will stick around awhile.