Vague Idea Racing: Back to some PMBAR

Thad and I had a chance to do some Monday morning quarterbacking on, of all days, Monday morning VIA a Bad Idea Racing conference call. Thad figured out that the overly tempting and abundant cold water from the North Mills campsites was a huge contributing factor in his demise. Since we passed it twice during the heat of the day in a relatively short amount of time he took in somewhere in the neighborhood of 60-70oz of pure agua diluting his electrolytes and causing all sorts of problems. Not only was his stomach a mess, but his lowered potassium levels caused him to have an irregular heart rate.

This is all my fault.

Had I decided to reverse my loop direction when I made a bad route decision (I decided to press on to the gate on 225 when I coulda turned down S Mills River) Thad would have passed the water at a cooler time of the day. He probably woulda been less tempted to drink so much refreshing water, and later in the race there would have been no cold water available unless we got it from a creek. Also we wouldn't have gone any extra distance (we probably covered @85 miles), so Thad woulda finished stronger. We woulda never beat the Koerbers, but perhaps we woulda moved up quite a bit in the standings.

Not only that, but...

Had I made all those appropriate decisions Thad woulda felt better after the race, stayed up later drinking beer as opposed to heading to bed @ 10:30PM, gotten up at 7:00AM as opposed to 3:00AM to head home, and not ended up in the wrong place at the right time and had his car washed away in a flood. It's all my fault Thad... then again, I didn't make you drink that water.

I worked on the PMBAR video again last night. I'm sad to say that I am no further along than I was after the 3-4 hours of work I put in on Monday night. The good news is that I think I figured out what I'm doing wrong, but the bad news is that 95% of what I've done so far is worthless. At first I was in the "I'm getting this done no matter what" mode, but now I feel myself falling into the helpless "I'm ready to throw my laptop in Thad's car on his next road trip and let it be whisked away by a raging river" mode. Maybe it will be done by next week... maybe.

Don't forget the ToTM goes on sale tomorrow at 9:00AM CST over on the Twin Six site.