Due to issues with my right Achilles and hip, I had to accept that I was going to the Flying Pig on the injured list, at least in terms of overdoing it on the Green course. Instead of feeling too sorry for myself, I decided to embrace my status and run the Yellow course (generally reserved for M/F-14), and I would also offer my assistance to the OCIN crew.

Part of the plan was to set up the O-Lynx radio controls so that there would be live data sent back for the announcer.

Since I was traveling light, and there was minimal time to plan and set up before each race, the idea was to keep things as simple as possible while still getting useful information for the announcer.

Here is where the radio controls and repeaters were placed at Middle Creek.

There was a radio control at the Start with two repeaters sending the signal back to the Finish. It may have been possible to go from the Start to the Finish without the repeaters in between, but I didn’t want to walk up the hill to the Start more then once, so I erred on the conservative side and put the repeaters out the first time.

Repeater 1 by the cemetery.

Two radio controls were put out at the location of the last control (100) and one was put out at the road crossing control (39). Photo courtesy of OCIN.

I also set up two USB wired controls at the Finish and connected everything to the O-Lynx software on two laptops and a netbook. Since I was hooking into OCIN’s wireless network for the OE2003 event data, and this process hadn’t been checked beforehand, there was a bit of an issue getting everything to work flawlessly, but I cobbled together enough data that Vladimir was good to go.

So, I got ready to go back to the Start for my own course. I didn’t make my assigned start time, and I was very amused by the time I got back up the hill to the Start by the number of people I passed who told me that I had missed my start time.

For me, it was pretty hot with temps in the mid 70s by the time I did start, and I was also feeling the lack of fitness on the hills. But, I took it slow and easy, and I enjoyed the course.

The Yellow course map from today. No tracks, because for the first time since I have owned a gps watch, I arrived at the start line with a dead battery. So, I wore it around with a blank screen mocking me for my carelessness.

Distance was 3.1 km with 100 m of climb, finish time = 49:03. Placed 5/17 on the Yellow course.