Innovation is the fun part of producing triathlon. In the beginning, a race director learns the basics: what equipment is needed, how to recruit volunteers, how early to stop publishing your phone number before race weekend.

In my role as race director I get to design the dust jacket and ink the first paragraphs, but I’ll never consummate the stories. Each year a new chapter is written as the plotlines develop depth and color.

The swim portion of the Freshwater Trust Portland Triathlon takes place adjacent to a Superfund site. Yet, Triathlete magazine dubbed this the “Greenest Race in the World.” Read how.

In seven years of organizing triathlons there has been only one thing, one entity, that has caused me to seriously consider a different line of work: the New York State Department of Transportation.

I was educated as a computer science engineer. I spent long nights searching for misplaced semicolons and fussing over finicky EPROMs. Thank the Good Lord I am now a race director.

The finish is the focal point of any triathlon. Typically blow-up arches are employed, accompanied by the ever-present drone of gas generators. For an event intent on embracing environmental sustainability, that wouldn’t do.

Jeff Henderson, RD of the Musselman Tri, authored an insightful newbie race director’s diary in 2003. He begins a new set of installments: A chronicle of what he’s learned in the intervening 7 years.

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.

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.