Ep 357: Kerin White, Richelle Patrick (January 10, 2012)

Rounds: Here.


Apparently Kerin slept poorly last night, in anticipation of these next games.  She tried reading a book to relax, but all these nine-letter words and prefixes and suffixes kept jumping out at her.  It wasn't relaxing at all!  (I can certainly relate to that; at my peak of involvement in the game, and still somewhat now, my mind was disassembling words like that all the time.  It's the Tetris effect in action.)

Tonight's challenger is Richelle Patrick, a personal trainer and receptionist.  A few years back (and possibly still now) she was involved in duathlons, both as an organiser and participant.  Richard remarks that we don't hear much about duathlons, and I agree; I was thinking it was another term for a biathlon, in fact, but the sports turn out to be different.  As Richelle explains, a duathlon is a bit like a triathlon but without a swim leg; it involves a run, a cycle, and another run -- she gives distances of 10km, 40km, and 5km respectively, but those may vary among duathlons.


Richelle starts off with an invalid word, and does poorly in the first numbers round.  Kerin extends her lead in the next letters round to be ahead by 24 points after four rounds.  That's hard to recover from, and while Richelle gets a little back she fails to take the opportunity presented in the last numbers round and Kerin is safe going into the conundrum.  Kerin solves it in the dying seconds to finish off a comprehensive victory, 65 to 38.

I kept track with David and Lily throughout, and while I was slow to solve the conundrum I got there at the fifteen second mark.  That's about as good as possible, really -- there was one longer word to be found as it turns out, but I'd not heard of it before and really the only blemish is the slowness of the conundrum solve.  A nice game tonight.

As usual, details after the jump.