Race Director's Corner

Details

1. Downtown finish for 2009! This was not an entirely planned change, as the road construction will still be taking place in 2009 on Huron River Drive during the race. Due to that, I had initially planned to finish back at Skyline for at least one more year. However the people at Skyline running the new school are obviously very busy attending to their primary role of educating America’s youth, and weren’t as receptive to having our race overrun them for a weekend as I had initially hoped. That was understandable.
   
   So I set up a meeting with the City engineer in charge of the Huron River Drive road construction project - Liz Rolla. She felt that the risks involved were much better understood this year than last having been thru the process once already, and she felt that accommodating the course thru the construction zone would be manageable. She further protected us by making sure that it was in the construction firm’s contract that they must clear the road and make it passable for our event. (Talk about a great race supporter – Liz, yer a trooper!) So with that in mind, I made the decision to traverse the construction zone and shift the finish back downtown.
   
   But, to be clear, Huron River Drive (near Bird Road) will be under construction (they don’t anticipate the delays they had last year), so there will be some impact on the race. The road will be closed to vehicle traffic, and there will be heavy equipment and construction material along the road side. We can expect a 15’ wide lane to be cleared for runners. The phase of construction that will be under way on race day is expected to be the “pipe burst” phase of the sewer repair, in which a new sewer line is installed underground by bursting the old one. This requires some holes to be dug (we’ll have those filled in before the race) but also creates a raised ridge in the asphalt a few inches high and a foot or two across. This will create a minor trip hazard. We will mark this small ridge as well as possible with cones and have a marshal stationed at the start of it. (See the picture below of this obstacle.) I had hoped to avoid this risk, but we gotta take what we can get sometimes. I plan to inspect the construction zone before the race, and I think it will work out fine.
   

   Road construction on Huron River Drive in 2008:

   
   
   

   
   Return to Top
   
   

 

2. Race T-shirt optional: Most people love the annual race T-shirt they get from a big race like the Dexter-Ann Arbor Run, but there are some (like me – and likely most of you as well) that have a drawer stuffed full of old race shirts. Some want to “stay current” and get the latest shirt, but others don’t give a hoot and simply don’t want another one, no matter how hard they train for the race offering it (or forcing it on them as the case generally is.)
   
   I am not a fan of making people take them if they don’t want them, but I have not made them optional so far because it does complicate the logistics. However, after two years of experience, I think my organization can handle the changes required to make them optional. The final straw on this decision came when my brother told me he actually stopped running races because he didn’t want any more of the darn T-shirts! (He may be a bit extreme, but with stacks of them in my closet, I did understand his point.)
   
   The registration for will default to getting a shirt, so if you don’t want one, you will need to specify that! (Don’t come crying to me at the Expo if fill out your form wrong!) And one other thing to keep in mind – we order so many shirts, we get them for a very low price, so the savings that we pass on to people who do not order them will not amount to very much, like ~ $2.50. But for those that don’t want one, that’s better than paying for something you don’t want. I hope you do want one, but it will now be your call.


Return to Top




3. Delhi Bridge fully restored:  after a number of years where the bridge was not open to cars, the historic 100’ truss bridge has been fully refurbished and it should be open for traffic of all types by race day. If that happens as planned, I am considering altering the half marathon course to include a short out and back loop across the bridge. This is far from certain as far as approvals go, but I think it would be a nice little course modification. For starters, it should be a fun little stretch. It would allow the starting line to stay where it was in 2008 – off busy Baker Road. And it would allow the half marathon runners to see at least a few of the other people who are running fairly close to them. Mostly I think it would be kinda cool to run back and forth across the old bridge, which also may offer a nice photo op. (We’ll have to wait and see what happens there.)
   
   Return to Top
   
   
   
   
4. New e-mail service: unfortunately the service we used last year discontinued their bulk e-mail service, so we not only lost their service but we also lost the list we’d put together. That means that the people who already had decided that they DON’T want an occasional update on the race will have to remove themselves from the list again. (Sorry about that. It’s certainly not my intension to bother anyone that doesn’t wanna be bothered, but I didn’t have any say in the matter.) We also plan to allow the other AATC races to each send a note to the DxA2 list, so you will likely see a few more notes this year. (Like 6. Sharing the DxA2 list with the AATC is the only place we will share it.) If you don’t want the occasional AATC race info, just take yourself off the list, simple as that!
   
   Return to Top
   
   
   
   
5. 2009 Registration fees:  with the struggling Michigan economy, we’ve decided to hold the line on our registration fees, so they will all be the same as they were in 2008. And if fact the online fee for the Kids Run was reduced by $2 to make it a little easier on families with kids. So come on back and run, walk or jog just like you did last year! (I do know of one Senator from Alabama that I won’t let run, walk, or jog in this race for any price, but that’s another issue.)
   
   Return to Top