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Posted by Grant on 17. March 2009 21:33
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We hit a milestone this morning; we added the 20th team to our race roster for Untamed New England!
I've been lost in details for the upcoming Swiss event (very cool new race site on the way for Switzerland), and have slacked in some of my promotional duties around the New England race, but it's nice to see the steady stream of teams signing up for New England in July. We have nearly 4 months until the race, still, so this is a great achievement and lets us breathe more easily when looking at our race budget.
I hear talk of several other teams signing up -- including some very accomplished racers --, but they may be choosing to wait until closer to the event. It seems many adventure race teams are content to wait until the last minute before signing on.
By the way, it never fails that as soon as we close registration we'll get several emails from teams who want to race the event but just never got around to actually registering. We try to work with these cases, but invariably we have to turn people away at some point. These ultra-last-minute teams usually fall into one of three categories:
- Really good and serious athletes who are so busy racing in other events that they only plan a few weeks ahead. These are teams who have gear that is dirty and wet from the race LAST weekend when they show up for gear check-in for the race THIS weekend.
- Teams that are a train-wreck and unlikely to finish the race. If a
team isn't organized enough to sign-up before deadlines or paying
enough attention to hear the warnings that a race is filling up, it's
unlikely that they have their act together enough to cross the finish
line of a 200+ mile journey.
- Strangely, I have also seen a hybrid of the previous 2 categories: a
team of serious athlete train-wrecks that are fit, intense,
disorganized, and prone to catastrophic mistakes (like reading North
instead of South on their compass and losing 10 hours on a section or
leaving their race instructions in their hotel room and not realizing
it until 1 hour into the race). I think they know how fast they can be
and it makes them frantic when they need to be poised. Poise is
probably the most under-valued skill for successful adventure racers,
by the way. Poise is also very hard to demonstrate when you haven't
slept for days!
I guess I write this just as a caution for those planning to wait until "later" to register: which category does your team fall under? I've always found that registering early helps focus my training and galvanizes my team around making the event a success. The sooner I see my name on the race roster and have the date marked off on my calendar, the more effective my preparations are for the race.
We're still a good ways off from closing race registration for Untamed New England -- but it is safe for us to say the race is over half full at this point. Our race permits are based around # of racers and if we get 10 more 4-person teams signing up, we'll be hitting the ceiling on permits much sooner. This is why we don't throw out a hard cap . . . it depends on the size of teams that register.