All Systems Go: A Note on Coronavirus
Fellow Runners,
The past few weeks have been tumultuous, to say the least. We’ve seen and experienced things that, with a little luck, will turn out to have been once-in-a-lifetime events. Through it all, we hope everyone is well and able to find more time to do the things they love. Even if your spring race has been cancelled – rightfully cancelled, to be sure – now is a perfect time to extend your runs and appreciate the details.
It’s what we’ve been doing. Our best thinking tends to arrive mid-run, when our minds aren’t occupied with the minutiae of daily life, so we’re making it a point to put down some miles. We’ve thought about a lot of different things, including how the Coronavirus has affected the trail-running community — and what, if anything, we can (modestly) do about it. We wanted to share our thinking with you.
We’ll start by saying that we have no plans of cancelling or postponing any of our events. (Sometimes, doing nothing is doing something.) Since most of our races occur at higher altitudes where snow is still falling, we host them in the latter-half of the season. At the welcomed risk of being guilty of wishful thinking, we hope Coronavirus will be an understood and managed risk by the time our first event rolls around in July. We hope many of you who have had races cancelled with be able to join us this summer and fall.
For all our events, we’re also developing detailed contingency plans. We aren’t enacting these contingency plans and hope we don’t have to — we’re just developing them. As an example, for our first race of the season, the Sawtooth Ridge 50M, we’re developing a “contact-light” race plan that turns Sawtooth Ridge into a “fat ass.” We’ll ask you to carry your own food, and our aid stations will have volunteers who dole out water but skip the hug — nothing personal, of course. If we activate this plan, we’ll pass the savings along to our runners. Fat-ass races are, by design, laid back and cheap.
We’re crafting these contingency plans with an eye to increasing “refundability.” If we have to cancel an event, we want to get as much money back to you as possible. We can’t return every dime — but we can try to get darn close. What does this look like? In the case of making Sawtooth Ridge a fat ass, we’d ask runners to bring an old bib with pins and write a “new” number on the back of it. BYOB — “bring your own bib” – is a tried and true fat-ass practice, and one of many small changes that add up quickly.
We’re also opening dialogues with our runners, stakeholders, vendor-partners and RD peers. We have the fortune of maintaining excellent and open relationships with a number of RDs, and we’re all sharing ideas and best practices. Everyone is facing more questions than answers right now, but we believe the balance will shift soon enough.
Finally, we’re working with the U.S. Forest Service to stand up a brand-new race toward the very end of the season that, we hope, will be a sending-off party (of sorts) for Coronavirus. October in the Idaho high country is cold, but it’s also clean.
We’ll close by inviting our community to reach out with suggestions, questions, ideas or a simple desire to talk trail. In between those extended runs, we’ll be around.
Take good care.
Denis & Colin