Picking up from last time –
I don’t know if I feel this way because we were 3 water stops in 1, but I am kind of of the mindset that you can almost never have too many water stop volunteers.
I mean, I’m sure there is some number somewhere where it’s just too crowded.
We were not at that number.
As the race was starting, we hadn’t been given any specific instructions. I asked if we were to each stand at different tables, or what. And the person in charge said two of us should stay behind tables to just refill, and the rest should go in front of tables wherever it seemed we were needed.
Okay. So we just kind of felt it out, instead of divvying things up. (Granted, there weren’t that many of us to divide. So, even if we had been assigned tables/spots/whatever, I don’t know that that would’ve done much… People very well have had to move around anyway.)
Before runners got there, we set everything up.
This whole 3-water-stops-in-one thing really confused us all at first. The leaders tried to point how the tables would go. We’d start to move them. It would be wrong. We’d look a little dumbfounded. They’d then jump in to help physically show us where to go.
I guess in the heads of the people doing it, they totally understood and didn’t think it would be hard to impart this idea on us. But the lesson I took from this is that maybe it’s always better to err on the side of having to over-explain. Perhaps if we’d had some sort of drawing, map, diagram, etc., we may have understood faster without being slightly annoying to the people running the stop.
We also poured a bunch of water and Gatorade in cups, preparing for people. I didn’t realize the Gatorade came as concentrate that you dilute. (I thought it just came as Gatorade, but at least here, it did not.)
When we were putting the cups on the table, it was interesting to me how many people started by having a sleeve of cups in one hand and then pulling out a cup at a time from the top, and putting it down with their other hand…
It doesn’t seem like that would take all that long, but when you put someone doing that next to someone who was just tapping the sleeve on the table, letting the bottom cup go each time, you can see tables getting filled at something like only 1/3 of the speed of the faster way.
Of course once people could see that, everyone switched to the more efficient way. Hooray for efficiency. (Though I still don’t know the most efficient way to do other things, which we’ll get into next time.)