It always seems like a great idea to put on an event so close to home (6 minutes running time away) … but last time we ran an event at Menotomy there was torrential rain. So the cold weather this year seemed just fine, and lots of you thought so too: we had a great turnout for such a small area with over 60 participants.

Setting courses at Menotomy is always a bit of a challenge, as every feature has been used on previous courses, many times. In order to make things a little different, we chose to site registration, start and finish about 300m away from the 'ususal clearing,' rather conveniently right next to the playground. We also decided to have a map exchange for the sprint, which makes it possible to fit in nearly 4 km and still be able to read the map. Even the 2 km yellow course crossed over itself once.

The Egg-O aspect was new to us. We decided to set 6 extra 'bonus' controls, marked on a separate master map, and marked in the woods by a bag of plastic eggs. These controls could be added to any course (though I don't think anyone on the sprint chose to do so). Eggs found were rewarded with candy. On reflection, we should have offered either extra 'points' or 'seconds' as well as candy, to reward the older competitors. The younger ones all seemed to think that candy was a perfectly reasonable reward! Now we know for next time!

Many thanks to our meet helpers: Dean Sturtevant, Wendy Johnechek, Ian Finlayson, Ethan Hall and Bridget Hall. The event couldn't have happened without them, and they all endured the chilly morning with great cheer.

**Note on Times: many of the participants listed below also found some or all of the 6 optional egg controls. Times were not adjusted: so while it looks like they were slower, they actually went further. Next time we will be sure to indicate which runners went to extra controls and how many they visited.