"My memory is pretty shady on the entire history. I have all the early results on spreadsheets, but my memory without looking at them is pretty poor. I do remember measuring a course on Twin Branches and Glade that was precisely ½ mile. It was used to get the swim course rope exactly the right length. This was not during the first two or three years though. It was sometime later- maybe year four or five.
"There is also the story of the 'dropped spindle.' Ken Knapp was working the finish line and at about the time the 50th runner crossed, waiting for the next runner, Ken looked down to see about 30 of the bib tear-offs laying on the ground. ?? Bottom line -- following the event, we called all the folks having tear-offs lying on the ground and managed to piece together the correct finish order. It took about a week to get it correct, but we did manage to verify every position and match them up with the chronomix.
"I also remember one year when we (I think it was Rick Uhrig and me) just couldn't manage to get the scoring right. Eventually, we determined that a woman had given her entry to a guy. Somehow we determined that that was the case and contacted the violating parties. They both claimed it didn't happen, but a few days later the woman called me back crying and coughed up the whole story.
"There's also the year that it rained "cats and dogs" for the entire event!
"We ended up without transition splits because one of the chronomixes failed to operate. We simply included the transitions with an adjacent leg. In fact, I think the Reston event may have been the first (or certainly one of the first few) to include transition times in the results -- a pretty nice touch in the early days of the Triathlon. It took a team of about 15 devoted volunteers to do the timing with transition times. I remember having heart failure a couple of years when one or two volunteers had to drop out at the last minute."