It is good to be the Race Director

Packet pickup started on Thursday.  On Tuesday we scheduled delivery of the bibs and the D-tags.  Wednesday evening we were going to have a little assembly line party.  

Not so much. The bibs were not express-mailed to Brooklyn.  They were sent to Garrison, NY, 60 miles away.  Not good.  But the owner of the home it was being delivered to was in Rhode Island.  Very Bad.   We moved our assembly party to Thursday morning, the morning of packet pickup.

But where are the D-Tags?  It seemed Cronotrack just forgot to make them.  “No problem,”says the nice man in Indiana at 2:00 PM.  “We can make them now and ship them "Overnight-AM Delivery" to your home.” At 8:00  AM, the nice UPS lady rings my bell.

So we get the tags and the bibs together 5 hours before packet pickup starts.  And we see that the relay teams only have one number each.  We need three.  More FEDEX.  We make it work.

Oh, I forgot about the headbands, our giveaway.  At 8AM Thursday morning I get an email from the guy who ordered them for us.  "There is a problem with shipping them here.  We got 500 of them, but 1,000 are still in Columbia.  Not Columbia, South Carolina.  Colombia in South America! So in 10 hours Trail Heads makes, and ships another 1,000 custom headbands to us.  All’s well.  We also got a delivery of the 1,000 headbands that were stuck in customs.

Water to be returned!

We did not know how cold it would be so we bought too much water.  We actually returned 25 cases (6 gallons each) of water to Costco.

I am not even going to get into the insanity of getting a permit to actually have this event in Prospect Park.  No, I can not put that in writing.

My Donald Trump Moment.

But, nobody noticed.  We had over 1,300 people sign up for the event.  We collected piles of clothing to give to the young athletes of Belize.  We gave out samples of Cherry Juice and FRS drink.  After the race runners got apples, oranges and massages.  We raised $1,000 for the Prospect Park Youth Running Club.  


My biggest kick was seeing how much fun the volunteers had.  It really make me feel good to get people to do something that they did not plan on doing and then seeing how much of a good time they had.

When I was almost done I put my name on the list and got the last massage.  My teammates came over and whispered last minute questions to me.  I thought this is how Donald Trump must take a break too.

And then I go on the read comments on blogs that look like this "Sunday was the annual Cherry Tree 10 Miler and Relay in Prospect Park.  This is a great race organized by the Prospect Park Track Club.  I highly recommend it, if you’re anywhere near Brooklyn in February."

I am so looking forward to February 19th, 2012.