Would absolutely love that; but no start up funds create quite an issue. I've wanted to get involved for years, but as they say, "it takes money to make money". Having never known the powers that be make it hard to gain attention.

See if an existing gravel race would be OK having the triathletes start 30min after the gravel racers for the swim. Then utilize the same bike course.

Might initially increase awareness, interest, and save on costs.

i did the hawaiian ironman in 1981, 4 days after my 24th birthday. february 6, 1981. in august of 1981 i put on my first triathlon.

i figured out the course, got all the permits, figured out how to do registration, issue race numbers, timing, awards, t shirts, medical, safety, opened registration closed registration, put on the race, in 6 months.

back then no one had ever heard of a triathlon, or an ironman, we didn't call ourselves triathletes, and every registrant except me (i did the race too) was a newbie, doing their first triathlon. nobody who registered was at that time a swim/bike/runner.

there was no internet. no online registration. no facebook. no email lists. no anything lists. so, where do you find people to get to enter your race? heck if i remember.

i worked in a nautilus fitness center. i made $9,707 in 1981 according to the social security administration, working full time. i put on this race in my spare time. i had no credit. no savings. lots of roommates. old car.

if you want to do it, you'll do it.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

mind, there are some GREAT race producers. i think stephen delmonte is fantastic. eva solomon. i could go down a list and give you the good ones. but, i don't have to. you know them yourselves.

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But what I want to know what makes the RD's great. Is it customer service, is it race venues, is it experience, etc. Because that to me is what's relevant and what needs to be discussed. What allows races to go on and what is creating races to shrink. I don't care who they are, I want to know WHY they are.

That's what we need to discuss......

ETA: Cus I don't think what one did 30+ years ago just "doing it" is going to work in 2018. In fact I think it's the opposite. You have to be much smarter with your selection/style/venue/idea of what you want to present. Just presenting a S-B-R in 2018 ain't cutting it anymore. So yes if your looking for people with some gumption behind their decision to do it, I 100% agree with you. But saying just do it, to me aint going to cut it.

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

happy to discuss that all day long! but at some point i need some folks to stop discussing and do it. so, let's discuss. meanwhile, i've been fielding some private reachouts from some of you who are interested in doing. bravo.

when i returned from kona, when dave mcgillivray, rob vigorito, murphy reinschreiber, bob babbitt returned from kona, none of us had any money, experience, contacts, wisdom, time. it was OJT. we didn't have imposter syndrome. we were imposters.

valerie silk was, to all of us in the early days, our one and only mentor as an RD. and i'll just tell you this anecdote. every year, every person who entered her race got a handwritten birthday card. and a handwritten christmas card. dear dan. love, valerie. blank card with only her handwriting on it. that's to everyone who raced ironman, including those who raced it in a prior year and who didn't come back.

does that speak to your question?

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

Dan,

I put on a series of four duathlons in Ottawa, Canada in 1990. At the time I was a lieutenant in the Air Force and doing my MBA at nite school. I invested out of my tiny $23000 per year salary to make it happen. I lost $1500 in year one, which was not bad. For year two I had to decide it I wanted to do it, again or if I wanted to use the time to train for my first Ironman.

Summer of 1990, I was 24 years old. My entire home was like race series HR. Like Dan said, there was no internet, no automated race registration, no timing systems. I had to create everything, secure sponsors and cut contracts with them, and get permits from local governments to close roads, beg Saint John's ambulance to give me ambulances and medics onsite. I was lucky to get to use a military gym as race HQ for 2 events and use a university gym for the other two. I also managed to convince a military unit's commanding officer to get a bunch of this troops to be road closure volunteers. I managed to get local "radio" to advertise my events for free (not sure how I managed that media placement, but I did).

I do not regret that effort for a second. The plan in year 2 was to add two triathlons. I did not want to do tris as a rookie in year 1 as I felt the variability around the swim course, life guards etc was going to be more than I wanted to chew off in year 1.

Around today in the Xmas holidays of 1990, I went for a long ski with a very good friend of mine who did Ironman Canada Penticton in 1990. He spent the entire ski convincing me to do IMC 1991. I finished the ski and had

1. Air Force engineering job (keep in mind, that we were getting the Canadian F-18 fleet software ready and tested for Gulf War1 at EXACTLY that time, so I was fried just form that....Gulf War 1 was due to start in 2.5 weeks)
2. MBA nite courses on deck
3. Duathlon series that I had to commit to or not
4. Just started dating the girl who became my wife (we're here 28 years later)
5. Trying to train whenever I could around that

So at 24 I decided that out of 1-5, number 3 would have to go in 1991. Sitting here 28 years later, I am not sure where my life would go if I tried to do 3 also....I ended up doing 31 IM's and ended up doing engineering+biz jobs the rest of my life, and still with the same girl, so I THINK I chose the right path. I THINK if I ended up going the RD path, then my engineering+biz career and IM racing would have not happened. I'd have gotten sucked totally into that as there was a decent opportunity back in the early 90's to make that stick for those with good vision and execution. Sprints and Olympics were big. Graham Fraser and subsequently IM had not YET brought IM to every corner store to effectively impair the local sprint/olympic scene...and duathlons were actually gettig big with Zofingen, Desert Princess etc. Duathlon had a runway for a while and they were much lower cost to put on at almost the same entry fee.


So would I do it now? No not now. I'm doing a tech startup now. Give me 7 years and I'll want to do another startup :-)

Dan, it looks like you organized your first race at 24 and so did I.

Soooooo....what does it take for my son's generation to step up and be RD's (he's 22 and now I don't think it is in his DNA to put one one....I think he's planning to get involved with the local XC ski club as a coach soon, so there is hope).

I’m intrigued. Specifically the gravel tho that’s an area I know almost nothing about. But my biggest limiter is time. Not desire. Whenever I see things like this it always seems like it’ll take the place of training and I don’t want to give that up yet.

If you wanted to bring gravel tri to NE FLORIDA I’d give it a go with you.

dev, i can work with anyone who has a fire in his belly, who's committed to paying his bills, whose word is his bond, and who wants to see the race happen more than make money off the industry of racing. him or her. but do you see what we had in common? we were both 24.

we had more the free time, lack of family commitments, no other better thing to do. the reason we don't have more fill-in-the-blanks in triathlon is because we don't have more fill-in-the-blanks in the business of triathlon. when we get more women in the business, we get more women as customers. when we get more people of color working behind the camera, we have more people of color watching the movies (if i might use that as a metaphor, and i wrote about one such person, marcus fitts, last month). we don't have as many millenials or Gen-Yers racing because we don't have what you and i were: 24 year olds putting on races.

ironman had 16 in its first year. wildflower had 87 its first year. if you look at today's 1,500-person gravel races, they had 100 or 150 their 1st, 2nd and 3rd years. i want to work with people, of any age, any gender, any anything, who want to start those races.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

Or I guess what I'm asking who are the "Dan's of 1981" out there in 2019. Who are the ones that are making events work that started with tight budgets and then able to grind to successes after a few years. Is it young people? Is it established RD's? Is it wealthy that don't need to worry about the budget?

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

i agree that if you do the same ol' thing, you're unlikely to get a better result. but let's consider 2 exhibits.

exhibit 1: delmo's women's-only pool tri in philly. yes, he's a proven RD. but, i'm sure he'd be happy to share with you examples of his flops. he sold it out, 1,350 women, closed weeks early, first year.

exhibit 2: herbert's swim-run. down your way i think. grows every year terrific word of mouth, throws off profits. which herbert reinvests, because he's not in it for the money.

i can keep giving you exhibits. no, i'm not going to put on the race you want, because i don't have a fire in my gut for a supersprint or an 8-lap DL tri. but, survival of shawangunks. herbert's swim-run, when i find a place that speaks to me, that wants an endurance experience, that needs a race - an unsurfed wave that needs to be surfed - then i'm in. and so will other people be. and not necessarily our current crop of triathletes.

if you think there's anyone who's interested, turn them onto this thread. just, i'd be as happy with a complete newbie RD as i would with an established RD. maybe more so.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

I had 80 in my first duathon, and then the next three it kept going up to 100, 10x and the last one was just under 120. Overall I had 400 over the year over 4 races. I knew that the first year $1500 "loss" was going to be made up in year 2 because I had the system and machinery in place to now amortize my fixed costs for the series and fixed costs per race. Plus I had established the relationships with the city, suppliers, sponsors and athletes were getting to know about the existence of the events.

BUT...I was 24 and was trying to figure out what to do with my life and I knew if I wanted to do this RD thing well, it would have to be my primary career path and would be a lot of fun....it also does not help that I am from an Indian family, meaning there is all this stupid society baggage to be a doctor/lawyer/engineer/accountant/corporate bigwig. I can largely say, I that I never did anything because of family pressure, but it is really really really hard to escape your roots. Just being an airforce engineer doing triathlon was sooooo out of the lane of my ethnicity already, but "at least" I was doing engineering in the Air Force and frankly I loved playing around with $35M hardware nd software as I was doing the dream job of what I wanted to do since I stepped into my first Boeing 747 flight from Montreal to Heathrow in 1972....so I went the "career route" rather than the "entrepreneur root".

I guess now it comes full circle....I get to do the tech entrepreneur route with this crazy sidebar sport related goal of kicking out Amazon as title sponsor at Kona LOL (OK you have to think big to get big).

Also in fairness to young people or anyone wanting to put on a race today vs 30 years ago....right now the sport is established. Three decades ago...everything was a startup. I bet you were paying prize money or for prizes before Valerie Silk was in Kona!

I think you might be right on this need for the industry. We have a couple great race directors here in the Boulder area - and Lance has told me Without Limits has a super-sprint relay race in the works, which I really hope becomes reality. But other than Xterra, no gravel tris or other unusual formats.

I've thought about taking on this kind of thing, but I always find reasons why I shouldn't. Right now I've got two startups going, including a tri-related one with the aerodynamic bike shoe. If that workload was reduced, I might seriously think about it, but that's not today.

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Ed O'Malley
www.VeloVetta.com
Founder of VeloVetta Cycling Shoes
Instagram • Facebook

the trick is to work really, really hard on finding the perfect course. first. perfect meaning very scenic, reasonably safe, and very cheap to produce.

the next trick is to figure out where the levers of powers to grant you the course. this isn't straightforward. but once you get this figured out - and i could help you get it figured out - then the course comes together quickly, or it doesn't.... quickly.

then you have to pacify the natives. lots of stories about that i could tell you. but the gist of it is, you don't want the power you have on your side to overrule the power the locals have on their side. you need to WIN the locals. have them on your side. this is why jerks eventually always fail in the RD business.

you have to be good at building a competent and willing crew around you. this may be the most necessary skill of any RD.

the rest is mechanics.

you now own a startup. what this will grow into, you don't know. but i can point to a few who grew pretty wealthy at it. the problem is counterintuitive: those who go into it hoping to grow wealthy, with that as the motive, almost never do.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

Epic Races (Eva's group) does really great, innovative stuff. Which is why I'm bummed another southeast Michigan company jumped into F1 racing before them.

3Disciplines is planning two F1 races in 2019 on Belle Isle in Detroit (a great venue for such a race). 250 m swim, 6 mile bike, 1 mile run -- three times. And then the top 12 men and women race again for the championship. This happens on Saturday and then the normal super sprint, sprint and olympic races are on Sunday. I hope they do it well and pull it off (this is the part where I withhold my criticism of this particular race company because you asked to not make it into a gripe session).

I think I've mentioned this, but I'm meeting with our town here to put one of these on this fall.

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----------------------------------
Editor-in-Chief, Slowtwitch.com | Twitter

 
I currently 'own' a race here in New Zealand, however in the process of putting into a Trust.

Whilst I'm not relevant to your request, I will offer some thoughts.

I started 4 years ago, I had a vision for where the sport was headed and how we needed to best prepare our youth. Rather than running with the traditional distances / formats for the kids I changed things up and tested them over various formats.

I copped a lot of flack the first year in the lead up to the event, parents (of course) and coaches thought they knew best and couldn't understand why little Jonny at 15 wasn't racing the sprint distance as that is what he would be doing next year at Nationals. I shortened everything to start with.

The festival is run over 3 days, and 5 races. The athletes (U21, Junior, Youth divisions) are awarded points from 350 down to 10 for each of the events, leading into a Super Sprint 'Grand Final' on the final day.

Year on year I've introduced a new event, and the new edition this year was an 'Eliminator' race. To give you an idea of how I 'mix things up':

Race 1 was a 'Lemans Criterium' the kids sprint 300m to their bikes, then race on a motorsport park draft legal, R-B-R-B-R ( so 4 transitions)

Race 2 was an Open Water Swim.

Race 3 was the new introduction this year 'The Eliminator':

In the Junior Boys there were 40 athletes so we took the top 20 on points leading in (after Lemans and Open Water), and raced them over a 100m swim / 400m run. After the first time through the last 8 were 'eliminated' instantly. The remaining 12 kept 'rolling' through S-R-S-R with 3 being eliminated each time, until only 3 were left to race the final lap. Then the 8 who were eliminated first 'roll down' to the B elimination race and compete for 13th - 24th. First 8 'eliminated' then roll down to C race etc.

The Grand Final is then followed by a mixed team relay with a focus on skills and fun (although obviously some kids take it very seriously, most are shattered by this point)

Every year I introduce something new to encourage adaptability and learning.

Successful organisers told me the first year it would take 3 years for the event to start 'making money', it actually took 4 but the festival has secured ongoing sponsorship now, hence why I'll put it into a trust rather than our company have to underwrite it.

I have received feedback that the older members of our Tri community here in NZ would enjoy an event like this too, so I plan to start developing that idea in the New Year.

I think the key for us here in NZ (which has a different landscape to you in some respects, but in a lot of respects we're the same) is to think smart in the first few years whilst getting the event off the ground and sustainable. For instance I don't use timing companies. I award the festival on points, that way all you gotta do is 'grab' the kids as they cross the line, and line them up in order. Again its only ever the parents that want timing, so they can say that their kid is fastest in T2 or whatever.....

Community is massively important. The whole event is based on the goodwill I generate throughout the year with my wife's coached athletes, they 'buy into' what we're trying to achieve, and having it the week before Christmas they're on breaks after 70.3 and happy to donate time. Community is the key I think in events these days. You should search out Rotorua Suffer on FB, Shane Hooks is another organiser who really gets it, he understands the power of a community in successful events.

Hope this helps Dan & all the best for New Years.

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http://www.sweat7.com
Facebook Page: Sweat7
Twitter: @sweat7coaching

What was the support and/or reaction from NZ federation? Helpful, non-existent, hinderance?

(ETA: I ask because a few years back an guy was trying to push for more DL races as part of the NCAA movement and he was getting some "push back" from PTB's about timing of races, etc...IE- creating headaches).

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

 
I guess this is where we're in a different landscape to you. We have had a very high turnover of staff within our federation, and there is very little money around. We could do with our own Gwen, or another Hamish.

Tri NZ used to deliver a National Talent Festival out of Auckland, I went to have a look at it, and found out it was costing them $40k to deliver. So I proposed to the then HP director that I would deliver the festival here in Taupo instead, and have them actually race rather than testing in a lab / running on a track etc. It was a no brainer, we were in a situation where our funding was drying up and I was offering a solution. I've had buy in ever since, the festival is heavily reliant upon the regional coaches and them prioritising it, that's another community we really involve them in the process.

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http://www.sweat7.com
Facebook Page: Sweat7
Twitter: @sweat7coaching

Thanks, you've given me the motivation/desire to pursue after a 1 day or 2 day swim TT + bike/run multi-brick style race. We have good local RD's who are supportive of youth development and race series, so that may have some good ideas to brainstorm.

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

welcome back to the fight. this time i know our side will win.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

And back then few of the lawsuits that abound today happened. Exposure is a far cry from those days. Fire in the belly does not work today. I was also a race director in the long forgotten past and could expound on how I was a ground breaker, but it's completely irrelevant i current times.