| Another June, another fun-run in the woods put on by the Friends of Harold Parker! A gorgeous day for it, with bright sunshine and relatively low humidity. Our route signs and most other infrastructure had been set up the previous day, so we were all ready to rock. |
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Runners checked in under the park pavilion. We got well over 150 people this time! |
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At the start/finish line, the Racewire folks set up the usual sensor
mats.
These use RFID to read the chips in each runner's bib as they cross, and
I'm still kind of amazed that it can be that accurate at the distance.
Official race results from the day can be
found here.
[The new "raceroster" site seems quite a bit more functional than the old one that Racewire itself used to manage. Their finish-line pictures are actually fairly reasonable, and not behind an obnoxious paywall. So maybe there's something to be said for customer-focused restructuring...] |
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Someone got on the bullhorn and had all the runners move down to the start area and vaguely line up behind the gate. This time I was up on a ladder so I could video the start from above and actually see everyone's faces go by. |
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And they're off! Click the image for a short (silent) video of the start. [~ 12 Mb] |
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After that I hauled ass down to my chosen spot, and got there about five
minutes before the first "elite" runners made it around to there.
Here are my on-course photos.
Getting good images on a bright sunny day like this is tricky.
I set up where I could see a good stretch of relative shade across the trail,
and tried to wait until runners were fully in shadow before shooting.
This yielded images a bit on the dark side, but bumping up overall brigheness
in post and fixing the white-balance to be less green brought the subjects
out nicely.
I didn't care if the background sun patches got all blown out in the
process, that's not what we're here to look at.
Other than that, high ISO and short shutter speed are the key parameters.
Small images link to larger more detailed ones, 1200x1200 in a new tab, so just close those to return to the main page. I'm pretty sure I captured everyone who ran/walked, in the order that they passed by (across, then down). I was at about the 4.4 kilometer mark, so people were a bit tired by then! |
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Jill came along as sweep, and we walked back together collecting the rest of the trail signs. |
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All that took a while, but there were still some hot dogs left by the time we returned to the pavilion area. |