Why don't things just work the way they are supposed to? My bike computer was sporadic all weekend, reading zero half the time (and yes I was moving forward). My heart rate monitor was on the blink today, reading 61 when my heart was a pumping on my ride. My body did not feel right today and I cut my ride short at 41 miles (in this case the root cause is understood.......excessive levels of Jager, beer, and Wii last night with evil friends who are clearly a bad influence on us, yes you know who you are). But worst of all, chip times are not available from the Lunar Rendezvous 5k due to a system problem. The chips used at the run are not the well known Champion chips, but a new system from IPICO. The chips are flat cards that one ties on ones shoes. I wore one at the Bolder Boulder this year.
Well at least the timing people got everyone's gun times. I shudder to think of a race that delivered no times to the runners. Ouch.
Other than that glitch, the race turned out quite well. I enjoyed being the master of the mile two marker once again this year. The drill goes as follows. As the fast runners come through, I am all business, focused on times. As the times get progressively slower, I get progressively sillier in an attempt to assist/distract/motivate those that are hurting in the back of the pack. Things like picking up the marker and waving it back and forth, moving it closer to the oncoming person, exclaiming that the course is downhill and that the weather is 62 degrees with 10% humidity as so forth. People do seem to like it, if you are hurting any distraction is good, I know I'm there a lot. Besides, it is my mile marker and I'll do what I want to.
As for JD's disdain for the 5k, I should not even acknowledge his weak attempt to disparage the logic of my arguments with his inane banter obviously written under the influence of one too many brewskis.
On the other hand, I will agree that the 10k is peachy keen and promise to devote a future blog to its homage. I have a great fondness for the 10k, as it was my first target race. Also the Bolder Boulder just sent me a nice little ribbon in honor of my completing that 10k in a time that is underneath my age.
Given that, I declare my favorite distance for running is the length that I can cover in minutes equal to my age. So let's hear it for the 7 miler!
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Imagine my surprise when I saw the IPICO system earlier this morning in Fort Worth at the El Scorcho Run. I spoke with Mary Berger with It's About time. She and Chuck Campbell of San Antonio are the only two that are using it.
They picked up the chip times just fine, with the exception of the winner of the 50K on his last leg.
It was interesting to watch the race develop on the computers as each runner passed the same point on the 5K loop.
They loved the 5K so well that the 25Kers did it 5 times, and the rest on here can do the math for the 50K.
They had one instance where it picked up the timing chip from about 2.5 feet up off the ground. (The women's winner didn't have her chip on as she went through the first loop. One of the organizers put it in his pocket. She kept having like 5-minute split time appear and Mary couldn't figure out why. Well, right before the 50K winner finished, he came and handed the chip to Mary. Everyone got a good chuckle as he was triggering the chip every time he came close to the finish line!)
Disdain? What disdain? Brewskis? What Brewskis? It's always genius that is misunderstood...
Unfortunate that the chip times were lost. To me, it defeats the purpose of having a chip at all if you only get a gun time! But Lunar Rendezvous is not the first race I've done where the chips malfunctioned. Unfortunately it's a fairly common occurrence.
You're right, at least they got gun times!
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