Note
'Bent and I did our final vetting of the Tree Hugger race course today. He did 9 controls on foot, and I did the rest of them with a combination of biking and hiking. It's always risky when I renumber the controls at the end to assign scores to them, so in addition to making sure that the flags are all there and the clues are all legible, we also needed to ensure that the control descriptions and clues were still correct for the renumbered controls. Phew.
The good news is that the flags were all still there. The last two race courses I've designed were in Palgrave West, where a crazed neighbour went a long way off-trail to tear down flagging tape, even though I'd explained the race to his wife and had purposely kept controls away from his house, which is 10 meters from the conservation area boundary. He collected a big bag of flagging tape and ranted at another neighbour, rather than phoning me up. Part of his argument, apparently, was that we had "no right" to be in there. He obviously doesn't know how much money we pay the TRCA and the insurance company! Anyway, I lost one flag in Albion Hills earlier this week, but that's not too bad, considering the number of people who go there vs. Palgrave.
Time: 2 hrs
Mountain Biking (Trail) 1:10:00 [2]
Challenging biking today, thanks to a light dusting of snow on top of wet leaves and tree roots. I was reminded of why I stopped using clipless pedals in winter, since today I was frequently getting off my bike to visit controls, and the bottom of my cycling shoes accumulated big ice balls on the cleats.