So You Want To Be A Race Director
Becoming an official race director has been one of the most rewarding, frustrating, stressfully amazing things I have ever done!
For a year and a half I planned, made maps, templates, walked the staging areas, had meeting after meeting after meeting. Countless hours on the computer and ran every section of the courses, had backup plans and back up to the back up plans.
The one thing I didn't have a back up and a 2nd back up plan for was someone pulling the race course flags or moving them to other trails....
This didn't even slightly cross my mind and wouldn't you know it, its the one thing that did go sideways.
The 100km course started a 5am with the runners excited and ready to go, off they went and 30 minutes later there was 7 people back at the start line! I couldn't believe it! I was shocked, someone had moved the flags and reversed some of the arrows.
I am not going to go into a long winded explanation of what happened over the next few hours, but I will say our community is amazing! Not only were the athletes incredibly gracious about the situation, we had friends and complete strangers run and ride a massive portion of the course to keep the runners on track and safe. It was truly amazing and still gets me very emotional.
Putting on an event, for me at least, can not be done without a ton of support!
The Bush Babes & Bro's crew, friends, family and amazing volunteers.
Trust is one of the biggest things I had to learn to do during this process which isn't easy for me. I had to learn to let go and trust that my team new what their rolls were and would do what needed to be done. They did, not only that they took care of me and gave me a chance to walk away and take a breath when I was feeling overwhelmed.
It was so amazing to watch them rise to the challenge and do such an amazing job without me micromanaging them.
We took on a big challenge for our first year, 2 races back to back on the same weekend! When it was done we all said NEVER again! Well never say never, we came to the (almost) unanimous decision that we will do the Freaky Creeky 50 and the Kal Park Aqua Terra back to back again in 2020!!!!!
Next year we have even more contingency plans, for the September 19th & 20th race weekend and have added 2 more races to our roster making it a series.
Again I say I won't be doing this with my BB&BRO'S Team.
They keep me organized, give input, question ideas (which I love) and keep things real.
To my Team, family, volunteers and everyone who raced our events this year, Thank you from the deepest depth of my heart. I almost lost my sh@# that weekend but if not for your assistance, kindness and graciousness.
See you in 2020 for our new race series where you can earn yourself a cool jacket and become our Trail Series Grand Poobah!
Slay The Dragon, June 27th 2020
Soup 2 Nutz, July 18th 2020
Freaky Creeky 50, Sept 19th 2020
Kal Park Aqua Terra, Sept 20th 2020
