Team TRYIT (Gary Groven and Eugen Feraru) leap into action!

The profile for Team TRYIT has been posted on the Teams page.  See their profile and all the others right here: Teams

Team Boston Tea Party (Cassidy Rehl and Ludy Liu)

The profile for team Boston Tea Party has been updated over on the Teams page.  Follow the link for all the details: Teams

The profile for Team Intern (Nick Rydberg and Matt Nelson) has been added to the Teams page.  Check it out over here: Teams

Mark Benson and Jason Sheard of Lefty and Skinny

The team profile for another team has been posted over on the teams page.  This time, it’s Lefty and Skinny.  Check out their vitals over at the teams page: teams

Gerardo Rojas and Glenn Jackson from Team Southern Fuego

The profile from our competitors from the deep south - Team Southern Fuego - has been posted on the teams page.  Check it out right here: teams

Team C4 (Steve Sheldon and Dan Reichstadt) have their profile up on the teams page located right here: teams

The team profile for XLR-99 is up on our teams page located right HERE: teams

We’re starting to update the team profiles..  first up, Team 0xDEADBEEF!

Their profile: 0xDEADBEEF

All team profiles: Team Profiles

Keep watching this space over the next couple of days for more profiles!

The Minneathlon 2.0 planning committee is happy to announce the following field for Minneathlon 2.0 to be held on June 27th, 2008

• Lefty and Skinny (Jason Sheard and Mark Benson)
• XLR-99 (Jemiah Aitch and Jason Braucht)
• 0xDEADBEEF (Mike Scheidnes and Matt Hilden)
• TRYIT (Eugen Feraru and Gary Groven)
• Intern (Matt Nelson and Nick Rydberg)
• C4 (Steve Sheldon and Dan Reichstadt)
• Southern Fuego (Glenn Jackson and Gerardo Rojas)
• Boston Tea Party (Ludy Liu and Cassidy Rehl)

Thanks to everyone who entered - and good luck next time for those that didn’t have luck on their side during the selection process.

Start picking your favorites - fame and fortune - or at least fortune - may depend on it!

One of the toughest early challenges to putting together Minneathlon 2.0 was deciding how to pick the contestants. It was easy last time - put the names in the hat and draw 6. This time, we’ve got 8 teams, we’ve got three automatic entries (more on that later), and we’ve got teams that both raced before and applied before. We also realized that there is a problem with precedence - assuming we’ll do this again.

In the end, we really wanted to favor multi-time applicants that didn’t get selected before. We also still wanted to give a small chance to everyone - even if you raced last time. We ultimately used a weighted probability system where a varying amount of points were awarded depending on a few factors. Here is the ruleset we finally landed on:

• Boston: One automatic entry, decided by the Boston office
• Austin: One automatic entry, decided by the Austin office
• Prior race organizer: One automatic entry

The other five spots were drawn using the random method and the following formula:

• 10 points per person for their first application without having been previously selected
• 5 points per person for each subsequent application
• 1 point per person for having run the race before (the score resets to one once a person gets selected)

We ended up with the following weighting:

• Lefty and Skinny – 30 points
• XLR-99 – 30 points
• 0xDEADBEEF – 25 points
• TRYIT -25 points
• Intern – 20 points
• Clueless Jokesters – 20 points
• Team Tim – 11 points
• Team Ramrod – 2 points
• DJ Lloyd and Mixmaster Harry – 2 points

Stay tuned for the actual announcement of racers! We’ve already made the selections and we’ll publish them soon.