I raced the Oktoberfest Sprint yesterday (WRQ, but as a plain old age grouper), could not have asked for better weather. I chatted with the Cal coach and a few of his athletes for a bit. It was great seeing so many college club teams show up. There are a load of committed athletes out there, pity they don't get the coverage they deserve.

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The secret of a long life is you try not to shorten it.
-Nobody

Made the trip from Grand Junction (to race & support the Colorado Mesa women's team). Fantastic to see all the varsity programs there (& hoping maybe some of the club teams will be able to make the jump soon). There'll be a new time in the west next year as my alma mater Montana State University-Billings is adding women's triathlon.

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#swimmingmatters
Laugh hard. Run fast. Be kind.
The Doctor (#12)

Just look at "the love" the ITU Worlds AG Standard distance feature got where American Todd Buckingham grabbed the overall win. I no longer write weekend features for exactly that reason. I could have been spending time with my family, or training, or just hanging out, but instead I ended up putting up such stories with zero response and maybe a dozen likes. The passion is maybe only there when it is not featured.

They are too bogged down writing the Ironman Wisconsin report from a few weeks ago.

Yet you'll do a write up on Swim-Run events that take place in the middle of nowhere with 200 participants??

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"Good genes are not a requirement, just the obsession to beat ones brains out daily"...the Griz

Yes, it was ideal weather & a nice race. It was not ideal to do a sprint with 6 days rest between after a half iron, but pulled it off! The course was nice, but a bit short on the swim from advertised.

Because I get amazing pics delivered to me asap. Something Norseman pioneered and most other races still have not figured out.

For our race here in NC for which I work for free but we pay good photographers to show up, and we also make sure to make great pics available to all the athletes and the media. Thus our race has been featured in the Boston Globe etc.

Example: https://www.flickr.com/...ts/72157689987419446

Tell me what I need to do and I'll get you race pics + race recap from the NCAA East regional in Liberty next month. Email? DM?

ETA: I'll even see if I can get race quotes from athletes/coaches.

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Brooks Doughtie, M.S.
Exercise Physiology
-USAT Level II

Email is typically how images and race details (results, start lists, weather, water temp, incidents etc) come to me and the pics need to be good.

I will message you my email address

I came from utah to do the draft legal men's race. Wish there were more guys racing, but it was a fun day. You're right though, the swim was crazy short.

You are asking the wrong question. Your questions should be. What do I have to do to secure coverage. To whom do I send pictures, results, quotes, weather, etc.

There are some small events that get at lot of coverage. But that is due to hard work over years from those events.
In the endurance world, coverage is a privilege, not an expectation.

I think those questions would apply if these were MY events. These were NCAA events.

Last week's Central Regional was the only major domestic race in the US. While there were some great athletes at AG Worlds, I think that it's worth asking if anyone cares about AG racing results outside of the people actually mentioned in the articles.

This past weekend's West Regional was one of 3 major races in the US, including Augusta 70.3 (which had a great write-up on ST), and MLT Tempe (which got zero coverage on ST).

I suppose my single comment is that there is a lot of pretty awesome racing going on and ST is missing the boat.

I got 700 yards on my Garmin, I talked to a few others who also got 700 +/- a bit. It seemed to me the leg between turns 1 & 2 was short, I swear there is usually a 3rd buoy out there. Lance posted on FB later in the day that his orange buoys gave up the ghost and wouldn't hold air that morning, so it's possible they shortened it a bit so as to not have buoys spread too far?

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The secret of a long life is you try not to shorten it.
-Nobody

If you're volunteering to procure excellent photography and send in a writing sample, that's one thing.

Races that get coverage are typically ones that we have a reputable source for photography and updates to provide a story for them. The majority of them are written by Tim, although Herbert and Dan will also post up a race-related coverage item. That being said, if you've been paying attention, we're looking for stories outside of just the elite end of the field - whether that's gravel racing, or SwimRun (both of which have elite racing, sure, but that's not the ONLY story), or stuff well outside of racing itself. Because those stories matter and should be told, too. I'm of the opinion that they're more important than race coverage.

Then again, there's a whole bunch of people who are on the forum who don't know there's a front page to Slowtwitch, so what do I know?

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Editor-in-Chief, Slowtwitch.com | Twitter

It looks like USAT did a write up of the East Regional Qualifier, if anyone is interested. 85 people in a race that should have only held 75, followed by the Midatlantic Collegiate Conference Championships Club DL and Olympic races (which weren't mentioned in this article).

Last year, the DL bike course (only club athletes, since the East Regional Qualifier was in FL) was four laps of what was used as the DL run course instead of two longer laps (that follow part of the OLY bike). I was working with one of the USAT officials and we both agreed that if the bike course was 4 laps instead of two laps, more people would have been lapped out on the bike..especially since Knoll from Queens essentially biked away from the rest of the field (same thing happened last year when she was racing club for Queens).

Agreed. More bike laps is better.

Especially when there's an obvious disparity between the front of the pack/middle of the pack athletes and the back of the pack athletes.

One thing to think about is that USAT doens't want to "lap out" it's racers, atleast if they can help it. ASU racing against D3 X school who's running through transition in their bike shoes and doing zero flying mounts, etc. That's the disparity that they face when they get the likes of ASU/Queen's vs *some* of the schools and said athletes. So USAT is going to "protect" the race as much as possible.. I sat at the mount line and looked and how poorly they got onto their bikes, I was astonished how many were in the big ring up that hill and had zero momentum.

They are still growing it, so they have to balance the competitveness when schools who are coached and being run like pro level ITU squads- Cliff English, Sonni Dyer and others (yes they all have to follow strict guidelines on practice hours, but I'm referencing the concepts/structure) with D3 schools who are being coached by the local AG coach who is very very inexperienced and thus really have zero business racing each other. But that's all part of the growing pains, and I believe this year at NCAA nat's they are doing divisional races for the 1st time, no cross division races (or maybe D2/D3 are mixed together, but there is a distinction between some of the divisions now, as it should be). So now they can hold full races, they have to luxury of dividing out the races at the national level, but still not yet at the regional level. D1 imo doesn't have enough to support their own race- they have what 3 teams, so that's what 20-25 girls in a race?

Thanks for volunteering/working the race site. I love that venue but dislike it's location. I'd be in favor of putting it in a more urban/town centric area, not an area where the closest hotel is what 45mins-1hr away.

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Brooks Doughtie, M.S.
Exercise Physiology
-USAT Level II

All of what you said makes complete sense. It isn’t really fair to have pro girls from Queens and ASU lapping out D3 girls who just started racing/training for triathlons this semester. That may be one reason why the DL bike course was changed from four laps to two, if NCAA realized the disparity as well. Like you said, the bike mounts of people near the back of the pack were kind of atrocious. Doing divisional races would be a great idea, it’ll be interesting to see if they do that at Nationals. Once they have more schools, I could see that being more feasible, since they’d have the ability to put more than 25 girls in each race.

If they were to do that for the East Regional Qualifier, it would have allowed more people to race, since some athletes didn’t get in with the race being capped at 85 people. However, if they think about doing that next year they will have to hold all the DL races on one day, and the Club Oly on the next day. It’s too much of a cluster to have all the races on one day...not that it was Kinetic’s fault this year, NCAA/MACTC/Liberty all decided to do one day of racing.

As for the venue, it is a bummer that it’s kind of in the middle of nowhere, without hotels close by. SML does have cabins available for rent on property, they might have comped the fee for this specific weekend. There are also AirBnB houses in Mariner’s Landing and some of the other neighborhoods around the race site that are a lot closer than hotels. This venue is also used for the Appalachian Power SML sprint tri in May each year, so it has a history of being easily utilized for a race. Other than the old Angels Race course in downtown Lynchburg, there’s not really another easily utilized site in the area. I think Liberty only has the contract for regionals for a certain number of years though?