(to VCTC folks: please free to pass this on if you think that's worth it) So, yesterday, at 17:30, 9 DebConf attendees met at Carman building of Columbia University in order to go participating to the Van Cortlandt Track Club bi-monthly 5km cross-country summer race.
After a simple trip to the end of subway line 1, we easily spotted the group of race runners that were aggregating at one of the parks entrances. I could easily spot those folks I ran with a few days ago and who were amazed to see 10 of us joining (Marco Tulio arrived a little bit later) and all (or nearly all...) wearing the DebConf tee-shirt. The race itself went well for all of us: everybody finished, from the most trained up to the slightly less trained. The race course is quite hilly with about 60m positive slope all over (estimated as of now as I didn't process my GPS data), which roughly means 0.3km extra distance, according to most runners' experience. The race results haven't been published on the Van Cortlandt Track Club web site but will certainly soon be (http://vctconline.ning.com/page/xc-summer-series-results-2010). Noèl Köthe was the fastest runner of our crew and did indeed finish 17th of the race out of 170 runners. He was ranked 2nd in his category and thus got a price, which he shared with all DebConf runners, as this was a muffin...:-). Noèl completed the race in a really good 20'50", which will be appreciated by those familiar with running. One should notice that the first runner completed the race in about 17'30", if I remember correctly. Gaudenz Steinlein was the 2nd runner of our group, completing the race in 21'40", but he's trained to up and downhills and just said us that compared to Swiss mountains, those were just a joke (according to his sweat after the race, I definitely don't trust him on that one). Between Noèl and Gaudenz, we had a local runner, namely Roman Shtylmann, who happens to be a Kubuntu/Ubuntu/Debian user and just popped at us when he spotted the "Debian" word on our t-shirts. Roman will then be considered as part of our group! Then came other runners of our group, namely myself, Iustin Pop, Grégory Colpart, Luca "gismo" Capello, Justin Azoff, Marco Tulio, Maximiliano Curria and Margarita Manterola. All of us completed the race in less than 41 minutes, which is great. DebConf and Debian thus got a little bit more exposure and there are now probably 100+ people in Bronx who heard about Debian and what awesome folks we can be..:-) And, last but not least at all, I have to mention that Luca *did* run with his kilt, including the sporran (the pouch that goes with a scottish kilt and has to be worn in front of the groin of the wearer) and did an amazing 30' or so result which is definitely impressive in such a dressing. Local runners were definitely amazed and thrilled by this. For the record, in case this goes outside Debian, the kilt is using the officially registered Debian tartan (http://www.tartanregister.gov.uk/tartanDetails.aspx?ref=5936). As a conclusion, I have been very happy to launch this idea of participating to a "real" race in the neighbourhood. We met great and very welcoming people. I would definitely recommend someone living in New York City, or even spending some time here, to join the VCTC runners, either for one of their races, or one of their Saturday morning group runs (http://vctconline.ning.com/page/sat-morning-group-runs). List of DebConf participants to the VCTC race (country codes from the IOC official codes list, not ISO codes): Noèl Köthe (GER) Grégory Colpart (FRA) Gaudenz Steinlin (SUI) Justin Azoff (USA) Christian Perrier (FRA) Margarita Manterola (ARG) Marco Tulio (BRA) Maximiliano Curia (ARG) Roman Shtylmann (USA) Luca Capello (ITA) Iustin Pop (ROM) _______________________________________________ Debconf-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-discuss
