Seriously, someone said that on Facebook, the worst race ever. I think this actually might have set the new standard for NYC runner hyperbole (probably not) and on every level I knew it wasn’t true but it still bothered me, it still stung. The writer and I are now friends on facebook so all’s well.

I literally had a realization last Spring that if NYCRUNS were really going to be self-sustaining, it had to start putting on races. It seemed like a Herculean task starting with permits and insurance. To say that we knew what we were doing when we had The Lousy T-shirt Race would have been a bold faced lie. To say we got lucky at Brooklyn is an understatement. What a great day.

Every race we’ve worked on something has gone wrong but every race has also been a learning experience. Most of what goes wrong is unimportant or even amusing (did you know air horns freeze?) but sometimes it’s not. There’s really no other way to do what we’re doing than to learn on the go, and we’re not perfect.

I would say nearly every race we do suffers from some disorganization and that’s because nearly every race we do is something we are doing for the first time, and we do it understaffed, under financed, and sometimes without enough volunteers. Sometimes our vendors let us down (the toilet people just don’t seem to like delivering at 6AM).

The big problem Saturday was our new timing equipment failed and the backup had not arrived yet. You always have a backup of this equipment, always. Nonetheless, we figured we could get away with it once…not so lucky this time. This is something we would never have risked at a client race by the way. Ironically, we billed this race as the first time we were using the equipment and cheekily said - what could go wrong?

So, before the race I had to make an announcement and an apology of course and say it would be a fun run, not a race. Saturday night, I wrote a long explanation of what had gone wrong and what we could do to make it up to those that cared. Complaints were honestly minimal – most people had a really fun time. It was a beautiful day and there was hot chocolate. 90% of the people at most races just don’t care about scoring that much.

I probably was more upset than most which is why I am still anguishing over it and why I am recruiting a ton of extra volunteers for Saturday’s race and planning things in some fairly exacting detail. We still don’t have our second decoder (timing box) Le sigh. The fact of the matter is that I want NYCRUNS to put on races that are incredibly sound – well measured courses and state of the art timing and scoring for manageably sized NYC area runners. This is a huge part of what I want the product to be. So, the fail was a real fail to me.

I can handle the disorganization and vendors let you down– I think it’s part of being what we are right now – a small business with limited resources in a really competitive market. Some people say NYRR is a monopoly. I don’t think that’s true but there are reasons no one created NYCRUNS before me. This isn’t easy and you don’t get rich quick. It is fun though and has rewards.

If there’s one thing that clear though – most of you get it and have our back.  I feel like you know us (and you do) and you’ve been contributing to our growth since the website launched in some cases. I feel like you’re giving us the chance to get where we’re going and I’m very aware of it. Eventually we’ll be delivering races of the highest quality and without 10,000 runners every time.