Tevis coverage

["guest@endurance.net" <guest@endurance.net>]

Lucy Chaplin Trumbull elsie@calweb.com
Laney:
> 
> To all the folks who brought us such great coverage, 
> The pics were great but all your energy and enthousiasm 
> are greater!  The sport owes you, big time! 

Energy? What energy? I'm still sitting here
in my jammies (er, actually, my tevis volunteer
t-shirt), unwashed and bleary... At least I have 
coffee here. I'm eyeing the clock nervously...
will my husband get home and catch me still in
front of the computer? <erk>

This year was the worst for me (this was my
4th year) and I really crashed badly. Don't
know why exactly. It was really tough - and it
wasn't even that hot.

I will try and get my loose ends tidied up as
soon as I can (like the fact that I now have 
my web site split into two parts, so some of the 
links on the individual pages don't quite point
to the right places - I need to move the calweb.com 
part to the sharemation.com place... but I'm at home 
on a 26k connection and I'm not moving several MB 
of files on that <grin>.)

An uptodate index of what I put up is at:

http://www.calweb.com/~elsie/Tevis-2000

Hope you guys all enjoyed it. 

The biggest stress for me is to try and get 
stuff up as soon as I can - and that's pretty 
hard at times - you can't decide what to do first.

So I suppose my question to you, is, would
you like the pictures up fast (file dump to
web type format) or would you like them tidied 
and captioned?

Would you like to see individual pics of every 
single rider - 

(which takes *hours* to take as the riders trickle 
through (or run through, as at Squaw... but as someone 
commented - even when they run through, it's amazing 
how long it takes for 250 horses to go past), and even 
longer to upload - I took 292 pics of every single horse 
at Squaw - but it took me from ~9:45 to 2:00 to get the
first 200 thumbnailed and uploaded to the web... even 
with Marc Van Zuuk as my personal "uploading slave" to 
help me (he didn't even know he'd be pulled into doing
that... sorry Marc). The other 92 still sit in "dump land") 

- or would you rather see less pics, with more in depth 
details? 

I had lots of stories to tell, but not enough time 
(or energy) to type them all out as well as get pics 
up, so opted for the pics only - but wanted two bodies, 
so I could do both.

My biggest conclusion is how much I *hate* trying
to do anything on a stupid lil' slow laptop. It
really slows you down and is frustrating.


> Jonni <jonnij@earthlink.net>
> Yes indeed, the photographers and reports 
> during the ride were GREAT. It is a tough job, 
> that these people do because they WANT to, not 
> because the have to.

hey, we get t-shirts... <g>

> I'd also like to thank the 
> Tevis webmaster for all the data he was entering 
> as the radio calls came in. At one time we had 
> "lost" a huge group of riders coming into Robinshons 
> Flat. Seems the radio connection was giving problems. 
> But we sent him and e-mail, and he kept his sense of 
> humor, and spirits up as he tryed to get those riders 
> listed. He deserves a Tevis buckle for typing 100 miles 
> in 24 hours<grin>. 

he really did a wonderful job. It just gets better
and better every year (and that's the trouble, he's
raising your expectations each time... more fool him <g>).

we ended up tag-teaming the updates of in-times
at Foresthill at one point, with four of us working
on fetching the times and typing them in and sending
them over. That got us out of a hole.

> Thanks to everyone who had anything 
> to do with the webcast. It let those of us who could 
> not be there in person, be there in spirit. 

You should see what it's like to be actually here.

Even what you might think is a relatively simple job -
like being an out-timer at Foresthill - is a hard one.

The volunteers who do those jobs do GREAT! Talk about
fraught - riders coming through in bunches, shouting
out numbers, riders asking for the time, how many minutes
do they have? riders asking for updates on other riders,
crews looking for pulled riders and horses, having to
make sure you get all the numbers down, while processing
the pulled horses, and the out-horses, people wanting 
all sorts of info. You try and make yourself as well-
informed as possible, but you still fail dismally.

"What's the cut-off at Francisco's?" one rider asked
me.  Erk. I didn't have *that* particular sheet of 
info on me at that time. But it's information I *should*
know.

> BTW, you want to see what brings some people to this 
> ride, look at the photos from the top of Squaw, as 
> the sun came up. The beauty and wonder of these 
> mountains is awesome. Go to:
> 
> http://www.calweb.com/~elsie/Tevis-2000/squaw.html

It was glorious. Definitely the place to be.

But I have to say, that big bunch of front runners 
(huge bunch) scared the hell out of me. So *fast*,
particularly when you consider they just came up
~2500' feet in about 2 miles.

* * *

Please let me know any thoughts you have on the coverage
(plis mail me personally at elsie@calweb.com - I'm not
currently *on* RC) and any future things you'd like
to see.

-- 
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Lucy, actually at home, for once
in Sacramento, CA
elsie@calweb.com
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