Back to 'normal' today - no outfits to slow us down, and a clear route to the first chicane-less corner, so no excuse for slow times. Unless you were a Barber - Paul "hangover", Laura "stitch", and Jeanette "my collar bone is broken"; ok, we'll let you off, Jeanette!
Oliver was back to his job of interviewing the ever constant flow of first timers with his usual alacrity, then Run Director Alan spent a good few minutes explaining the course (Flag and Sandcastle backwards again), before the usual announcements, with a landmark performer having forgotten to bring cake, so we would have to do with last week's leftovers!
On the course, life was pretty uneventful, with several people passing me as I slowed down in the last 2 km, and Andrew outsprinting his dad to the finish.
Cary slowed dramatically towards the finish, blaming 'Stopwatch Bingo' for his noticeable lack of effort!
Apparently 'Stopwatch Bingo' is a nerdy sort of 'collectors' thing - it's explained here:
"The idea is simple, every time you finish a parkrun, you discard the “minutes” bit of your finishing time and use the “seconds” to complete a virtual bingo card, that contains sixty numbers from 00 to 59."
Apparently Cary needs just 3 more times to complete his card, so he was deliberately slowing down in an effort to get one of them.
I'm missing 11 seconds to complete stopwatch bingo, but I'd like to claim that I'm not being nerdy in knowing that. It's just that the Running Challenges Add-on for Firefox tells me so (along with lots of other fun, but arguably nerdy, parkrun stats and challenges).
ReplyDeleteIn my case, I won't be employing any tactics to collect the missing seconds. They'll surely be gathered in due course.
I've nerdily downloaded the app. I have two missing entries in 'stopwatch bingo' - got nowhere near either of them in the 6 runs over the past two weeks.
ReplyDeletePerusing the data adds a little zest to the conversation whilst we sort the tokens...
I managed to pick up another entry on the second run of New Year's Day, which retrospectively justified not deploying a 'sprint' (ha!) finish on that one!
ReplyDeleteAn 'entry' so geeky you don't say what it was!
ReplyDelete