I’ve been meaning to share with you portions of the NYC Marathon ’08 Results Magazine for some time, having received it sometime January. It’s interesting what went into a marathon of this scale. While one can appreciate the grandeur of a major city marathon of NYC’s vintage, this doesn’t mean that small town marathons can’t be crowd pleasers. By focusing on the runners, some neighbourhood races do have their own charm, case in point the Bidor Half Marathon where bib collection is from a quaint tailoring shop. Then there’s Bidor being a foodie paradise of its own. Well, you get my drift.
Where I’m getting at is events need not be large to be successful. It’s relatively easier to organize a fantastic small event than it is for a mega-hyped one. When you’re as large as the NYCM, it becomes exponentially more difficult to maintain that touch of personalization in your dealings with the participants. You’ll need to invest not only in people but also technology to carry it through. It’ll become harder to a point where you can no longer please everyone. Do it wrong, folks will say you’re only in it for monetary or political reasons. Do it right, there are still bound to be voices of dissatisfaction. Then it will be pragmatic to apply the 80:20 rule – as long as 80% of the participants are happy, you’ve done a good job. I’m not advocating that with such challenges, organizers of small races should discard their dreams of turning theirs into a huge outing (that is, if they have intentions to grow it big).
Please do continue to work towards that but know what you’re getting yourselves into. Observe, talk and seek out information. Get in touch with the runners’ psyche and know what they look for. Deliver as hyped and promised and proven track records will speak for themselves. Good or bad, you can be sure the blogs and forums will be too.
Anyway, on to some interesting trivia from the magazine.
Consumption at the start: 1,800 gallons of Gatorade Endurance formula 40,000 cups of Dunkin’ Donuts Coffee
Course: 32,040 gallons of Gatorade Endurance formula 2,250,000 paper cups (collected for recycling) 42,000 Powergel packets
Finish: 38,096 finishers (66% men) 98.1% finisher rate
Charities: USD18.6 Million raised by 5,000 runners.
For more of these, click on each thumbnail to view the full page.
Where I’m getting at is events need not be large to be successful. It’s relatively easier to organize a fantastic small event than it is for a mega-hyped one. When you’re as large as the NYCM, it becomes exponentially more difficult to maintain that touch of personalization in your dealings with the participants. You’ll need to invest not only in people but also technology to carry it through. It’ll become harder to a point where you can no longer please everyone. Do it wrong, folks will say you’re only in it for monetary or political reasons. Do it right, there are still bound to be voices of dissatisfaction. Then it will be pragmatic to apply the 80:20 rule – as long as 80% of the participants are happy, you’ve done a good job. I’m not advocating that with such challenges, organizers of small races should discard their dreams of turning theirs into a huge outing (that is, if they have intentions to grow it big).
Please do continue to work towards that but know what you’re getting yourselves into. Observe, talk and seek out information. Get in touch with the runners’ psyche and know what they look for. Deliver as hyped and promised and proven track records will speak for themselves. Good or bad, you can be sure the blogs and forums will be too.
Anyway, on to some interesting trivia from the magazine.
Consumption at the start: 1,800 gallons of Gatorade Endurance formula 40,000 cups of Dunkin’ Donuts Coffee
Course: 32,040 gallons of Gatorade Endurance formula 2,250,000 paper cups (collected for recycling) 42,000 Powergel packets
Finish: 38,096 finishers (66% men) 98.1% finisher rate
Charities: USD18.6 Million raised by 5,000 runners.
For more of these, click on each thumbnail to view the full page.
Labels: NYRR
posted by Jamie Pang at
12:05 AM
0 Comments
