The Second Annual Big Bend Triathlon was hosted by an organization called the Casa Grande Association (presumably named after a geological peak of the same name). The event, primarily for Big Bend National Park employees, involved Canoe racing on the Rio Grande River followed with bicycling and then running/jogging. A few competitors were not employed by the National Park.
I was aware of the event only because one of the aforementioned employees invited me to watch it. So, after rising earlier than was my habit and a brief road trip, I was at the starting line.
While each participant wore a number, I know of at least two instances of duplicate participant numbers. I realized these discrepancies only when reviewing the photographs for uploading to this web site. One image depicted three individuals wearing 24 during the running leg of the event (no pun intended) and two images of different men wearing 12 in the beginning and ending of the race.
I suspect that some of the participants competed in only portions of the triathlon, which would explain the absence of some of them from the above photograph. And only speculation might provide an explanation concerning the apparent duplication of participant numbers (provided this isn’t explained by any two or more competitors participating for—and under—a number assoicated with only one person on the sign-up sheet).
As for that image above…
I took several shots with individuals in each of them looking in various directions or at a number of distractions. For example, in several of those images the lone little girl of the group seemed compelled to hold a canoe paddle in front of her face.
So I took the best of four shots and created the above composite image of all the participants that had posed for the starting line-up photograph. In other words, the image above never happened but all of these people were there to accomplish this very thing. The editing, I fear, is a bit sub-standard.
I have attempted to identify individuals by comparing my photographs to participant numbers on a sheet that noted participant competition times and final rankings. This was not a precise science and some of the individuals remain unidentified and/or perhaps misidentified. That being said, competitors in the above image are…
Back row, from left to right: Alyssa Van Schaiks (sp?), Natalie Craig, John Craig, Henry Ring, Heather Hall, Jorge Martinez (with head bowed), Steve Ehrman? (appeared to wear 12 during canoe racing and when crossing finish line) unidentified female, Allen Etheridge, Ed Waldron, Beau Bracken, Jennie Gouther, Natasha Moore (name associated with number 24 worn by this man and two women not pictured here), Ben Welch, Michael Ryan, Jeff Renfro, John Brennan, Alex Brachman and Steve Ehrman (again?).
Front row, left to right: Matt Yarborough, Miquel Juardo, Mark Franklin, Maria Lavender, Sarah Hall, Jacob Oskin, Caelen Ryan.
The original image is a Tagged Image Format File (TIFF) with a file data size of 36.6 megabytes (MB).
For display on this web site the TIFF was duplicated and the duplicate re-formatted as a Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPG/JPEG) image with a file data size of 13.1 MB. To approximate detail visible at the time of capture the image was sharpened as necessary and resampled via the Photoshop Bicubic Sharpen algorithm. The re-sampling increases the image resolution from 300 Dots Per Square Inch (DPI) to 360 DPI.
Unless otherwise noted the image was corrected to offset color shift and balance. This restores black (shadows), white (highlights) and neutral gray (neutral mid-tones).
• An unnumbered image is the only one of the subject matter.
• A number corresponds to the sequential order in a subject-matter-related sequence.
• The letter “B” indicates color correction to approximate what was visible when the image was captured.
• The letter “C” indicates enhancement beyond an approximation of what was visible at the time of capture.