Saturday the race site needs to rise from the earth, and each athlete has approximately thirty questions they would like to ask, preferably now. But as my wife often tells me, I signed up for the job.
by Dan Empfield, December 15, 2009
Attention budding race directors: Here’s yet another attempt at quantifying how much it costs to put on a triathlon, and what it breaks down to by line item.
Aid stations can be cost centers, profit centers, or neutral centers. No matter of the size of your race, they can be done well, and cheaply. I like to think of them as stationary parade floats.
Want to be a race director? Here’s the skill of it: mapping out your traffic plan. Regrettably, even the casual racer discerns when an RD gave his traffic plan short shrift.
Have you ever considered where bike racks come from? I hadn’t, until I decided to run a triathlon. Now I suddenly need a million of them, and sadly they don’t show up in the Sears catalog.
The sponsorship tactics for the Musselman Tri could have been lifted straight from Kids as Customers, in which James McNeal classifies juvenile nagging tactics into seven major categories.
I wage battle with one of our committee members to see who can email the other fastest when we get a new entry. He’s ahead, and we are both pathetic.
The website is purring. I’ve got a Bike Coordinator, Run Coordinator, Safety Coordinator, and probably a Coordinator Coordinator working away at raceday strategies.
Getting sponsors. Yes, the task every race director looks forward to. If, that is, your favorite word to hear is, “No.” This assumes you actually get any word at all in response to your supplications.
Even if old ideas fade away, if they have value, they’ll kick around and reappear. So it is with “empty space” between a bicycle’s fork and its wheel.
I have made small in-roads toward learning what it means to serve others, but have not done as much as I should. The Musselman Triathlon is a chance to give something back. But to whom, and how?
This, a companion to “What’s in a tire,” describes the difference between butyl and latex tubes, and also the calculus of tire pressure, and how to choose the right pressure for a race course.
Chrissie Wellington rides hard. Very hard. And very fast. But does her position fall in line with what we teach and preach at Slowtwitch U, or is she an outlier bucking the trend?