CRC All Around Miler

Yesterday, our Charlotte Running Club put on our All Around Miler event on the campus of UNCC. The event ended up being small. We had just 11 runners, and just as many supporters. Side note, I was glad for the additional people because they helped make things go smoother.

I remember Peter telling that they had something like 3 or 4 guys come out for the first Idiot run. Now, they have well over 100 people.

How many fortune 500 companies started from humble beginnings?

Starting small is a good thing.

The organizers – namely CRC get time to figure out the logistics. Thinking about how something will work is one thing. Knowing how it works is quite another.

Last night I learned a great deal about race logistics and will use that knowledge to plan better for next year.

Here are some of the most important things that I learned:

·         15 minutes from one race to the next sounds good but in reality is near impossible to make happen. While I had the courses marked before any of the races started, there is still the need to walk from one starting line to the next.  Scoring 10 people doesn’t take that long, but we still needed about 25 minutes between race starts.

·         When I was picking up marking paint, I grabbed a couple of cans of bright lime green paint. The lime green works great for marking the asphalt and ok for marking the dirt. It is practically invisible when marked in the grass. I should have stayed with the bright orange.

·         Scoring the event should have been easy. Right? I just plug the values into Excel. Let it add the columns and do a sort on it. Everything was going great for the first 7 runners. Then, Excel starts formatting the values differently for the remaining runners. Try as I might, I couldn’t get the formatting to work correctly so I could then sort it. Finally, I resorted to manually summing their mile times. In the end, I was able to figure out the totals and then the awards, but I will definitely be doing something different next time.

All in all, the evening was hot but nice for running. Everyone had a good time and most important of all, every runner walked away with an award.

I do want to especially thanks Tim for taking so many pictures. Ed and UNCC for hosting our events. When I think about runner friendly community organizations, clearly UNCC tops the list.

 

Sharing one thought at time.

The Cool Down Runner