Putting out the controls for the Pre-Possum.
When I set courses, I usually put out tapes and test each leg several times. But Knob Noster is a long drive from home. And the day I'd planned to set tapes and test routes, I didn't make it because the roads were sketchy. I'd been to the park once a few weeks earlier and tested some ideas. The leaves were mostly out when I did that. What that meant is I set the course without the normal effort and hung the markers without tapes.
Fortunately, the control features were all pretty distinct and it wasn't too much work to get the markers hung. But it is definitely not a good practice.
You can see the courses on Brooke's log:
https://www.attackpoint.org/viewlog.jsp/user_1679/...My plan for the Pre-Possum was that the courses should be straightforward, but somewhat interesting. I wanted the times to be reasonable so people don't over do it the day before the main race. From looking at the results, I was glad to see reasonable times.
I tried to make the "long" course interesting by adding some direction changes, a bit of tempo change (e.g. the possibility to run trails to 8 and 9), and a few legs that could push you into a parallel error (3, 5, 7 and 10). Oh, and I wanted to keep people out of the less pleasant and more thorny areas.
I was amused that Simon made a big boom to 10 (about 4 minutes lost on a course he ran in 18 minutes).
Knob Noster is next to the Whiteman Air Force Base.* While I was putting out controls a B2 stealth bomber took off. They make a lot of noise. The sound is impressive, but I didn't catch a glimpse of the plane taking off. A couple of hours later a B2 flew right over the start/finish area. That was cool. They are amazing to look at (and depressing to think about them being used to drop bombs on people). Wikipedia has a lot of info about the B2s:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_Grumman_B-2_Spirit2
*Mary's dad spent some time at Whiteman (maybe before it was named Whiteman AFB?). I don't know what he was doing there.