Build a Better Pacer Trap

Ready or not, here I come.  Only about 8 hours until race time.  I should be sleeping.  I do at least have everything together.

I even have my rose-colored glasses, which I may need with a 60% chance of rain during the race.

Since my last post I did get a chance to run that new hill (which wasn't as bad as I thought), and it was raining, so other than my new "PACER" shirt and the sign, nothing new on race day.

Speaking of the sign, someone needs to build a better version.  I don't think there would be enough of a market for it to be a profitable venture, but there's a lot of room for improvement.  The forecast calls for 19 mph winds tomorrow, and I'm thinking that the 2-sided sign will be like a sail.  If I like the experience and do more pacing, I'm going to make my own sign.  Just running it through my head, I think it would work much better if the sign were an equilateral triangle instead of 2-sided.  That would make it readable from any direction, and it would be easy to point the triangle into the wind.  With the 2-sided sign, I either have to turn it so it slices through the air and can't be read by people ahead or behind me, or so the people behind me can see it and I'm constantly fighting the wind with it.  It would also be nice to have it on some kind of spindle so it would turn to the least wind-resistant angle.
Those improvements will have to wait, but I did make a couple of quick improvements tonight.  First, I used my staple gun to put 3 big staples on each side to make sure that even in the rain and wind, the sign doesn't come loose from the dowel.  The other improvement took a little more work.  I drilled a hole in the bottom and screwed a strap in that I can loop around my hand so I don't have to grip it so hard.  If I didn't do that, I would want a much bigger handle.  I thought about attaching the handle of an old hockey stick or putting the end of it in the strap for a hand-held water bottle.  It definitely needs some kind of improvement, because it's way too small for my hand.  I'm not Lana from Archer, but I'm not the guy on the Hardee's commercial who won't each a Thickburger because of it showing how tiny my hands are either.  Here's what it looks like for tomorrow.

Nothing left to do now but hydrate a little more and catch some Z's.  I can hear the rain against my window, so it should be some good sleeping weather.