@Challengers, Sunday evening, I was idly perusing the FLRC CHallenge activity log, as one does, and I started to sense a perturbation in the leaderboard. A pair of runners kept showing up on the same courses, albeit with some odd timestamps. It was a little hard to figure out what was going on, but after a quick conversation this morning, all became clear.
From Karen’s activity log, It looks like she and Bob started with Pseudo Skunk Cabbage early Saturday morning, drove east to Thom B, kept going out to Virgil to complete Forest Frolic, and circled all the way back west and south for Danby Down & Dirty and then Tortoise & Hare, probably as it was just getting dark. Then they came into Ithaca to do the Waterfront Trail and Black Diamond trail in the dark before heading out to the South Hill Rec Way and back in toward Cornell for the Cornell Botanic Gardens, finishing with the East Hill Rec Way. Seems like a smart approach with the waning daylight.
Adding up the official Webscorer times, it took them 17:42:35 to complete all 100K of the Challenge courses—impressive work, you two! Here’s the spreadsheet with all the completions so far: FLRC 100K Ultra Challenge Times - Google Sheets
I’ll be making custom FLRC Challenge signs for Karen and Bob and commemorate their achievements.
Let us know what it was like and how it went—we want stories! And pictures, if you have any.
I am not sure how our times came out any differently, they should have been exactly the same as I was adding mine manually using Bob’s time. If you can modify his time to match mine, I would truly appreciate it, he deserves the highest of accolades for his efforts on this epic adventure. He was tasking himself with the official scanning of the sign, then running back to the car to stow his phone to keep it dry, then reversing the process to scan at the finish as well. I could not have managed without him, which included our joint planning of the course order and drive route. We tried to hit all of the trails in daylight, however, we slowed considerably at Tortoise as the sun went down quicker than we anticipated, and only one of us had a headlamp at that point (lesson learned too late on that one). We also had to modify the course a bit because the upper bridge is washed out, but we did cover the official distance.
Thank you! I could not have done it without Bob Talda’s company (apparently a few of his scans did not load in the system). We were hampered a bit by the rain early on, and tried to wait it out a few times, but we continued to slog it out in hopes of still coming in under 24 hours (yay for us that we managed it in 22.5 hours including drive time. It was beautiful out there, none the less, and I am very proud of both of us.
Ah! Makes sense to delegate that task. Since Bob was scanning, his times should be the official ones, so I’ll tweak for that and make sure you have the same time in the end.
I’m tremendously impressed by both the physical and logistical efforts here—good on both of you!
And to make it official, I’ve added both your names to the results. I calculated the elapsed time based on the timestamp to begin the first course and the timestamp to begin the final course, plus the time it took to run the final one.