I’d like to take a moment and say thank you to each of our sponsors in 2007. Without their sponsorship, your swag bags would have been lighter and the prize table smaller. Our sponsors were very gracious this year and we want to take a moment to highlight the companies that helped us in 2007. We choose sponsors that produce/deliver products that we use ourselves or that we think would be of interest to those who participate in our events. We hope you enjoyed the goodies provided by our sponsors. Please think of our sponsors when you are making your next endurance related purchases.

Hammer Nutrition: Hammer Nutrition makes a ton of products for endurance athletes and provided samples and prizes for the UOG. I’ve sworn by e-caps for a number of years and use some of their other products as well.

Zanfel: Zanfel provided some prizes for the UOG. Cathi and I have used Zanfel after placing checkpoints in Poison Ivy infested areas a number of times the past few years. I think the most either of us got after using Zanfel was maybe one or two bumps with zero itching. I highly recommend their product.

Paceline Products Butt’r: Paceline Products provided samples and prizes for A24 before it was canceled. Anyone who has ridden a long ride without Butt’r can tell you what a great product it is. Any ride over 2-3 hours shouldn’t be done without Butt’r.

Mytopo: Mytopo printed all the maps for UOG this year. They make it affordable for us to give you great maps. You can print out your own custom map at their website too. Patrick and I have been very pleased working with Mytopo the last few years.

It’s no secret that Google Maps (and for that fact Google Earth) have been a huge success for Google. With the Google Maps API, anyone can add information onto a Google Map instance on their own website. In fact, we used the Google Maps API to give our team lists a spruce up last year. You can see an example of a Google Map loaded with all the registered Ultra O-gaine teams here.

If you visited the UOG team list before, you may notice a change in the Google Map linked above. Up until a few weeks ago, you could only have a map, satellite, and hybrid layer on your Google Map. A few weeks ago Google added a terrain layer to the previous layers available. With a few lines of additional code I’ve added the terrain layer to our own Google Map. I’ve been toying with some other ideas on how to use the terrain layer, so you may see this new option in Google Maps show up somewhere else on our website. Stay tuned.

[Via the Map Room]