FLRC Tough Trail and Tough Tarmac Challenges now open!

FLRC Challenge
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I’m pleased to announce that the FLRC Challenge now has two new Ultra Challenges. Along with the classic FLRC 100K Ultra Challenge, we now have two “half” challenges (which may or may not be around 50K):

  • FLRC Tough Trail Challenge: To complete the Tough Trail Challenge, you must run our five trail courses within 12 hours of elapsed time. The courses are Duck Trails, Lindsay-Parsons, FH Fox, Treman Trailipop, and Hammond Hill Hoctathon.

  • FLRC Tough Tarmac Challenge: For the Tough Tarmac Challenge, you must run our five “road” courses, also within 12 hours of elapsed time. The courses are Sweet 1600, Lakefront Loops 5K, Valley Views, Run Rabbit Run, and Freeville Fly-In.

Apart from the shorter time (12 hours instead of 24) and the specific course selection, the rules are the same as for the FLRC 100K Ultra Challenge, meaning that you must scan signs to start and finish, rather than entering times manually, and you must record GPS tracks and provide them to me for verification if requested. (“You ran 50K in 3 hours? Can I see those tracks?”) There’s no double-dipping, so if you complete the 100K Ultra Challenge, you don’t also get Tough Trail and Tough Tarmac completions. I’m still pondering prizes.

So we can all bask in the awesomeness of our ultra-stars, Steve Desmond has added an Ultra Challenges page to the list of reports that the leaderboard automatically creates.

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Steve and I have also added badges to athlete pages to indicate accomplishments, including completing all courses and completing one or more of the Ultra Challenges. To continue picking on Pete…

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I’ll congratulate our Tough Trail finishers separately (what, there are multiple finishers already?), and the rest of you ultrarunners can now start plotting when and how you’ll tackle these challenges.

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Cool.

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I like the new achievement badges. I had ideas about that two years ago but never brought it up, figuring it would be too much work to implement. Another badge idea is milestones for mileage, i.e. 100 Challenge miles, 200 miles, etc. And/or ones for multiple Challenge completions, like if someone finishes all the courses at least twice.

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Indeed—we started slow on the badges, but as long as @steve-desmond doesn’t think performance will suffer, I think more could be fun.

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Achievements! How (especially being a gamer) could I not figure out the word?!

This definitely starts to shift my mindset on how it could look, both on the front-end and under the hood…

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Yeah! All sorts of stats are possible.

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Just to clarify. While if I run the 100k challenge and complete it I would not get credit for either of the FLRC Tough challenges during that effort, but I could run the 100k Challenge and then a Tough Challenge on separate occasions and get credit for each correct?

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Yes, that’s correct. The Ultra Challenges are all independent, so doing the 100K Ultra Challenge doesn’t count for the Tough Challenges on the same effort.

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