Trans Iowa V11: A Big Hurdle Overcome

My view for most of the weekend

The cues are printed. That's a huge relief for me to be able to write. A lot goes into the production of these cue sheets and a lot of combined efforts are needed to gather the information and verify the data's accuracy. All of that comes to a head when I push the button to print. That process takes a while in itself, since I do everything "in house", literally, since it costs a lot less for me to do it that way.

The ol' printer is accurate and does a great job of printing, but it is sloooooow. How slow? You may be surprised to find out that I have about 13 hours on the printer just to do the cue sheets. It isn't like I can throw a switch and walk away either, since the paper tray can only handle maybe 20 sheets of card stock at a crack. That means I have to be around to keep the thing fed. I've learned how to do that so the printer never stops as well, which saves a little bit of time.

I know, many of you are probably thinking I should do something or another to save time, or make this more efficient. The thing is, I save a lot of money by doing this myself. Time? Yes, it costs me a lot of time. In this case, pretty much an entire weekend of free time was eaten up by this process, but I cannot afford to print these at a printer for anything near as cheap as I can do this at home. I know, because we used to have Trans Iowa cue sheets printed at a printer in the early years. That's when we only had 50 folks to provide cues for. And it was still far more expensive then than it is now for me to do it for almost twice as many people. So save your ideas unless they are super cheap to do.

At any rate, I now have to only do a bit of chopping, bagging, and packing then I can comfortably say Trans Iowa v11 is pretty much ready to go. There is the outstanding 76 miles of the end of the course that we didn't get to look at last weekend. I have a plan to check that out along with the bit to CP#1 on Friday before the Pre-Race Meat-Up, just to make sure there are no surprises.

Then the only thing we have to worry about is the weather. Of course, it rained heavily all over the course Saturday and Sunday. That said, it looks like we are to have several days of sunny skies before the event and no rain. If that happens, it should dry things up nicely, but it will be rather cool, with night time temperatures to dip below freezing a few nights coming up, which will delay drying somewhat. I really don't expect that we will have water or wetness issues coming into the event though. Whether that holds up for the weekend is still not 100% known yet, but things look to stay dry throughout the weekend right now.

Finally, I want to apologize to the readers here that are not so into Trans Iowa, but if you've been here long, you know that this is the time of year that Trans Iowa dominates the blog postings for a couple of weeks here. Stay tuned.......