January 02, 2006
by Anna DiBattiste

Ever wonder how a team with new members manages to get ready for a race like Primal Quest when the team members don’t all live in the same state?

It’s not easy knowing that your teammates have nightmares about turning on their computers every morning. But e-mail is a wonderful thing, all the same. The e-mails don’t fly out of control all year, but just at certain critical times: when the updates come out, when the gear list is published, when the certifications are due, when the website is being built, when we’re planning training weekends. And of course, they fly frantically for about a month right before the race. Once, during that period, a teammate from last year who shall remain nameless sent me a note that said, “If you send me one more freakin’ e-mail today, EVEN JUST ONE, I will check myself into the local psychiatric clinic and you will have to find a new teammate for the race…”

I’ve certainly met people who are anal enough to make me look easy-going. Engineers, accountants and their ilk. I guess I just haven’t met any of them in the AR world lately, because I seem to be the most detail-oriented person around these days. I make gear checklists, action step checklists, budgets, tracking sheets. My teammates often have to remind me that they have real jobs and can’t sit around reading my checklists all day. I just seem to have this uncontrollable fear that we’ll forget something important if it isn’t on a checklist posted on my bulletin board.

This year, I discovered that my new teammate Russ has conference call capabilities. Not those jerry-rigged kinds of conference calls where one person tries to string a bunch of lines together and inevitably loses one or two callers, but a real conference call line with a toll-free number and a code. Of course, I still had my checklists in front of me, but we could actually speak to each other about them. We even had Eddie, our first official alternate, join us on the call.

Luther is in his element on a conference call, because it means he gets to be the gear head he truly is at heart. He says things like, “I recommend that everyone buy a new bike light that has compatible batteries with an adapter to go from NiMH and NiCad, and weighs .06 ounces less than my carburetor exchange tube with the duoflage discriminator.” Or something like that. At least on a conference call I can say, “What?” several hundred times instead of sending more e-mails.

Russ is in his element too, because it means he can say things like, “Am I still on the team?” and sound funny instead of paranoid. His other favorite line, when Luther starts talking about the weight of our gear, is “My _______ weighs almost nothing, which will be great when you guys have to carry me off the course…”

We haven’t gotten to know Blain that well yet, but my sense on our first call was that he was just listening and soaking it all in. Blain is our most experienced racer, but also the one person on the team who hasn’t raced with any of us before, and in fact hasn’t even met two of us in person yet. I worry about the day he does. He’s already seen the photo of Russ on a bad hair day, so the worst is over. But he hasn’t even begun to experience the worst of my out-of-control e-mail days.

The topic of our first team conference call, was, of course, Holy Certs! Not sure if I’ve had a race with that many certifications before. I think it’s a good thing, however, to make sure racers are truly prepared. Don Mann’s reputation for dismal finishing ratios is not to be taken lightly. I opened the call by saying, “Do you think we can make an action step checklist with plans and due dates for each cert?”

“I’d like to go through the gear list first,” Luther said, “because we need to clarify the specs on the length and material required for each lanyard, and I want to make sure that none of our webbing weighs more than .0003 of an ounce this year.”

“Party on,” answered Russ. “Am I still on the team?”

Maybe these conference calls will get a little more focused as they go on…

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 29th, 2005 at 5:04 am and is filed under Archive, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.