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Brooktondale is an interesting place- lots of vintage campers and rvs around. Love this:
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Looks like the first part of the Valley Views course is closed for a bit today while an accident is being cleaned up. Probably best to avoid.
Thanks for posting that, Heather! I actually ran into that mess while biking this morning. I was going down Valley Road toward Brooktondale when I noticed tree service trucks backing up in the other lane toward me. When I got closer, a woman by the side of the road flagged me down and told me to be careful, and shortly afterward, I saw why.
A major power pole at the corner of Burns and Valley had fallen in the road, and wires blocked both roads with potentially live wires. I stopped and chatted with another woman who was there, and we agreed that turning around was the better part of valor. On my way back up Valley, the fire department people were coming to direct traffic, but it’s going to be a while.
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@medardia and I picked a muggy morning to tick this course off the list! Due to my work travel schedule I have had to squeeze these runs in when I can. It was great to have company and some nice views to make the sweaty miles go by faster, and an iced coffee at Brookton’s Market to cool off at the end.
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After a week of hot heat disgusting temperatures (yes, I’m cool weather person) it was a nice morning for a run. Marie kept me on course and put up with my picture taking. We even dressed the same. Lovely valley views and a working gravel pit (which I noticed thanks to the commentary). Bonus points for a route with a good downhill finish
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Thanks for suggesting the run! Perfect way to start a day that will otherwise be spent sitting down in meetings.
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Matt and I had a lovely walk with wonderful valley views early this morning. 
Thankfully the sun was behind the clouds most of the walk.
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For several years, I had been in “half marathon shape”. Injury recovery, return to running, rebuilding fitness feels like a process of one step forward, two steps back. Obviously that is not true since I have been finishing courses.
6 courses complete but only 36% of the miles.
Here’s to covering the ground!
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@Challengers I heard from a runner that the owner of Brookton’s Market wasn’t happy about her parking there and taking up a spot for an hour. I checked in with the owner, and she’s primarily concerned about weekends and when they have live music on some evenings. Please park at the Brooktondale Community Center (slightly east on Valley Road) or the Post Office (slightly west on Valley Road) in these situations:
- On weekends
- On evenings when they have live music
- Any time when it seems busy
Both alternate locations have map links on the Valley Views course page.
Thanks! We don’t want to wear out our welcome by taking spaces away from other Brookton’s Market customers.
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You might want to avoid Valley Views today!
I ran this course around 7 this morning, and it looks like a nasty storm came through last night. Trees and power lines down all over the roads and crews out trying to restore power.
Stay safe!
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My original plan was to get out of work at 5:00 to start the Tough Tarmac Challenge in T-Burg. But after the global IT nuclear meltdown thing, there was no reason to come in to work this morning. The plan changed to run two or three courses in the morning, work in the afternoon, then run the remaining ones to finish before dark.
It started off rough, before I even got to the market. I dropped the kids at daycare in Dryden and followed Google maps for the most direct route to Brookton’s Market. It turns out Irish Settlement road is closed for a stretch just south of Hammond Hill Road (where you turn left for the HH State Forest main parking lot.) After taking a roundabout driving route, driving through a construction zone, and trying to find the best spot to park, I finally got scanned the sign and started running at 9:33. The first two miles took me through three work zones where the road was partially closed for teams to trim trees around the powerlines.
My original plan was to save this course for last, finishing well after dark. A perk of the earlier start is that I was actually rewarded with Valley View’s valley views. (The only other time I ran this one was the middle of the night during the 100k.) Plus the mercury was only in the mid-60s, so baking into the asphalt without tree cover was not in the cards today. After a casual effort I finished feeling good.
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I ran this on Wednesday morning, and was thankful for having good cloud cover the whole time. There was quite a bit of storm damage that they were still dealing with, but it’s such a pretty run with so many interesting sights.
I forgot to share a post when I ran the course on June 2 with Simon, which was more fun than running it myself this week. It was definitely challenging for him, but it helped to get the big hill over with early, and to have fun things to look at all along the way, like a turtle, horses, and the cool gravel pits! And of course ending at Brookton’s Market was a treat – sharing a big blueberry muffin and a cold iced tea was the perfect reward. I like the mug that they happened to give him.
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I ran this a second time today with the good company of @lgilmer. We picked a good morning and started early. Lots of good views, a few more hills than I remembered, and unfortunately we finished before Brookton’s Market opened but we still snapped a sweaty finish photo (but we parked at the community center, don’t worry Adam!)
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I gave VV another shot this morning to improve my age grade score and help the Fab 40s fend off those pesky 50s. This time RunGo worked flawlessly after closing all other apps. No issue with the voice cues going silent mid run. It was also a little easiest than last week without all the roadside utility work and fewer quarry trucks to dodge on the homestretch.
@steve-desmond I’m curious what the formula is for individual runners’ team rankings. I know it’s derived from age grade and miles or courses completed, but how exactly is it calculated? Understandable if you decline to answer by citing “trade secrets.” As a (former) math nerd I’m curious more than anything.
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Great question, I had to go back to the code to get the exact breakdown of the “Score” column. Here they are in order of importance:
- 50 points for each course completed, for a maximum of 500 points
- you get your average age grade in points, up to 100
- 1 point for every marathon of “Total Miles”, with no max
- 1 point for every 50 “Total Runs”, also no max
So for @Petorius:
- 500 points for completing all 10 courses
- 53.89 points for your average age grade
- 15.74 points for running 412.7 miles (15.74 marathons)
- 01.52 points for 76 runs
equals a total of 571.15
@steve-desmond Hmm! The result of 1 point per 50 total runs seems awfully low compared to the others. Perhaps that should be bumped up to something closer to a 1:1 ratio, given that the mode of Total Runs is almost certainly 10? Last year I see only three people who recorded more than 100 times.
Here’s the initial comment/discussion from 2022, which jogged my memory that the numbers were tweaked the way they were to match the manually-determined top 10 team members in 2021.
The goal with this essentially tie-breaker metric was to primarily reward course completion, then within those that had completed the same number of courses: speed first (via average age grade), then those who put in a lot of miles but don’t have the speed for a higher age grade value, and then consistency for those who don’t have the endurance for more mileage.
We can definitely boost the “Total Runs” value, but that would skew towards more runs of shorter courses being more valuable. Right now, after completing all 10 courses, a 2nd (slower) run of the half-marathon course would net someone an additional 0.52 points:
- 0.50 for half of a marathon worth of miles
- 0.02 for 1/50 additional total run
while running 13 1600s (slower than their fastest) would be 0.75 points:
- 0.49 marathons
- 0.26 additional 1/50 runs
If we up that to a 1:1 ratio, as an extreme example, the same run on the half-marathon course becomes 1.5 points but the 13 miles on the track turn into 13.49 points. Sweet 1600 obviously has the most high number of attempts, given its relatively short distance, so we can’t do too much before it becomes really easy to game the system by simply spamming laps around the track.
Another (current) constraint is that the sum of the differences of the highest and lowest real-life values of each of the 3 tie-breaker metrics can’t total more than the number of points for completing a course for the first time, or else someone super fast with a lot of miles who only completed 9 courses could be ranked higher than someone who completed all 10 courses once slowly.
Who knew running needed so much math?! 
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Aha! I should have known that we (and mostly you) had put more thought into this. I see where it’s going with Total Runs basically being a tie-breaker now that it’s not listed in parallel with the other three metrics. No need to tweak now!
Since team member ranking is not, and is not meant to be, competitive, Steve’s explanation makes sense.
@steve-desmond I couldn’t help notice in the code that you entered Distance.MilesPerMarathon as a constant instead of the number 26.21875. This is way different than the rudimentary Pascal I learned 20+ years ago.