Competitor Profiles
Christopher Bean
Profile Index
I am a manager of a group of math & computer experts, married with a 2 year old daughter living in Severna Park, MD, USA. My main interests are puzzles, reading, and travelling.

I started road rallying (US style) in the late 90's running many events in the mid-Atlantic states. My best win was with my rally partner Steve Gaddy when we won the three-day 2007 US Road Rally Challenge in Pittsburgh, PA.

With the birth of my daughter in 2006, I have had less time to be out on the roads running rallies, but found I could still enjoy running map rallies, especially the St. Valentines Day Massacre and the other events organized by that group. Another regional rallyist with a great deal of experience in Canadian rallying pointed out your website to me as a very different form of rallying.

I attempted the Practice Rally and learned how different and challenging this style of rallying was. For the first half of the series, I was still looking up the terminology for what each question was asking. To try to get better, I worked through, after the rally was completed, the Masters questions and routes. This allowed me to get more opportunities to see the question terminology and see how to answer them. I still get very confused most of the time with questions about bridges, but as the series continued, I became more confident with a majority of the questions.

I plot the routes at my home computer using ruler and magnifying glass (although I do blow up the online maps to get a good look at problem areas).

It is clear from the events that it takes a great deal of time to put on a good TTR and I think everyone succeeded in putting together very challenging events that were always fair and extremely rewarding. I have greatly enjoyed all of the 2008 events and look forward to many more in the future!