RD INTEL

This blog is 90% about racing from the point of a race director, but there are several perennial issues that racers ask about. One of the top discussions each year is GI health and dealing with gut distress. Few things weigh on racers more than that uncontrollable, gut-wrenching queasiness.  I am excited to introduce one of our newest crew members, Heidi Frehlich, a professional triathlete and ultramarathoner who specializes in these very issues. ~BG

I first started out in endurance racing by crewing a team of coworkers from my former office. I could not believe that someone was capable of racing for 24+ hours and I wanted to see it for myself. I competed in my first race the following year, and 23 years later, endurance racing has become the focus of all my work. It's so common to hear "origin stories" like this from the people we meet at our events, and it shows that the first step into endurance sports is often not through being a competitor. That is why I am convinced that trail running is first and foremost about community. In my last blog post, I talked about how the racers - the people we meet - are what fuels our organization's passion for trail running. The TLDR version of this post - we hold a tremendous power to be a positive influence in the lives of everyone we welcome into our community, so let's be community builders at every opportunity. "Community" is our primary focus for 2023 and...

Love him or hate him, Simon Sinek has a lot of outstanding insights into the nature of work and how people interact (although, admittedly, he seems really harsh on Millenials). A number of years ago I saw a TED Talk where he said something that really resonated with me. It has informed virtually every decision we make as an organization, and it's also the title of one of his books:  Start with Why .  My background is in Industrial Design – designing the goods we use in our daily lives. I am a creator but I need some kind of outside pressure to spur me on, kind of like how a bit of sand irritates an oyster into creating a pearl. I have always had a strong sense of being true to my craft and making sure that I actually felt passionate about the things I was creating. I remember sitting in my office in Calgary, staring at the mountains and thinking "if I really want to be there, why am I here?" So when I quit working for "The Man" and started working full-time as a...

Ultra and trail running is all sunshine, chocolate, and rainbows... until you hit the witching hour* and everything goes off the rails.  Safety and risk management at races is something that few people ever have to think about because injuries are really pretty rare in comparison to the size of an event. Most surprisingly, it also seems to be one of the most overlooked steps in race planning. Everyone thinks about the fun times until they have that "oh shit" moment once something goes wrong.  As a race organizer of 21 years, I've seen a little bit of everything, but each emergency brings its own challenges. Likewise, no two events are the same with respect to emergency management. On many occasions, I've had new RDs ask for a peek at our emergency plan and I get a bit uncomfortable because there is no one formula that works everywhere; it's a process that you have to develop.  So, what makes for a good emergency plan?  KNOW YOUR RESOURCES . You either have to buil...

Here is something that only around  1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women think about. What colour of route marking tape is the best if you are colour blind? This actually came up for the first time this summer; it seems like most colour blind people just suffer in silence, so nobody had mentioned it until recently. We used to use white but switched to blaze orange (for a reason mentioned below). One of our course flaggers could not see the orange tape at all, which posed a real problem when it came time to take it down.  Colour blindness falls into four main categories: red, green, and blue deficiency, as well as the rarer condition of total colour blindness. Using the app Color Blind Pal (iOS and Android), you can approximate what people with each of the three main types of deficiency see when they look at different colours. Keep in mind that there are variations of each, and some people have more severe colour blindness than others.  SO... take a look at the four rows of t...

Someone asked,   "what the heck do you and your crew do in the winter" ? Well, I'm glad you asked. If you want to know more about what we're up to off-season, here's a snapshot.  Personally, I get up with the sun so when winter creeps in so I sleep in, then I work late into the night. I go cross-country skiing after work whenever I can. That said, the work doesn't stop and organizing our events is full-time for me. I did take a two-week holiday for the first time since before Covid - I'm not sure if it helped or not because now I have 500 unread emails! :S    Most of our crew are seasonal, with a few exceptions. Kirsti, who joined us in 2022, is the only other full-time person on the Sin Crew right now, and she handles the bulk of our social media and email inquiries, as well as project work. Alana is plugging away on fulfilling orders from our online shop. Cary gets busier in the winter as we have our year-end in November; he's swamped now. Lynn manag...