This weekend, I will be traveling down to the Atlanta, Georgia area. The main focus for the weekend will be taking the RRCA coaching certification course, which will then be followed by the second running of the ING Georgia Marathon. In order to get ready for the race, I started out by using my Checklist Generator that I developed a few months ago.
This was the first time that I really used the checklist generator, since I haven’t done any destination trips for a race since I’ve developed it. And you know what, it worked great! The default list had quite a few items that I wasn’t going to need, so I cleared those items out. There were a couple of items that I needed to include in the pre- and post- race bags that weren’t already on the list, but not many.
Mostly I just changed the items to be more specific. The luggage list, though, I highly customized. Since I’m going down to Georgia for 4 or 5 days, rather than just making a weekend trip of it, and since I am taking a class, I needed to add quite a few non-running related items onto the list. I then printed the list, interrupted my wife while she was studying so that she could tell me what I’d missed, and now I have an easy checklist that I can use to make sure that I don’t forget anything.
There are a few things that I think are worth changing in the default list, so when I get home next week I will probably do that. I just checked my database, and it looks like over 600 people have used the application to create a checklist, which is pretty cool! I haven’t actually checked that number since shortly after I created it, so that’s over 500 people in the last 2 or 3 months. Hopefully that number expands a bit now that the marathon season is coming upon us!
I had originally created the following video for Complete Running, but around the time I created it I was also busy getting ready to sell my book, and Mark was busy with the redesign over at Complete Running, so it never made its way over there. I’ve got the original video on my hard drive somewhere, so I’ll try to upload it to a better service than YouTube at some point, but if you want to see how the checklist generator works then you can watch this 5 minute introduction to it.
The checklist generator is a very simple tool, it only does one thing, but it does that one thing really well. And now that I’ve used it in a real situation as opposed to a theoretical testing situation, I’m glad I finally got around to creating it! It was on the back burner as a project for at least 2 years. Next time you are going to be traveling to a race, give it a whirl:
Awesome application-- thanks!