NMM '98


NMM is an abbreviation of 'Noordwijk Mini Marathon'.
Originally modeled after the L2B, it now is one of the largest events in the Netherlands.

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Rally Shield

The 1st edition was in 1998 and I was there.
As usual got up a bit on the late side and hurried to the start of the NMM which was at a small castle not to many miles from where I live.
I arrived a tad to late, but the organizers were friendly enough to allow me to register anyway.
Un fortunately in my haste to get there I'd forgotten to bring any money, but luckily I did bring a check.

After all that was settled I enjoyed a cup of coffee and talked for a bit with the organizers.
They were very surprised by the big turn-out; 148 Mini's, instead of the 80 odd that usually attend the bigger meetings.

The 'rally' as such was fairly simple; a map was given with a number of point indicated. At those points letters could be found and together you could form a word or sentence of which the 1st and last letter were given. As a tie-breaker the question was; 'How many Mini's took part in the 1st edition of the NMM'. Now that was a hard one ! :)

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Map Booklet

As I looked at the sheet I saw that the 1st letter was a C and the last a Y. As there aren't that many words ending in Y in Dutch, it struck me that the last word might be English; Century. And indeed the sentence 'Car of the Century' fitted perfectly. So even before starting I already had the answer to all the questions :)

Still, the drive was quite fun to do and even though the map was quite vague and it rained cats and dogs, I did find my way around rather well; in the end I only missed one letter.


During the prize-giving it turned out that the unthinkable had happened; I actually had won a Mini-event!
To remind me of this 'error of my ways' I got a nice trophy that is sitting lonely on my 'mantelpiece' :)

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Trophy

All in all a great event, just a shame of the weather.