If you participated in the 2013 Hungerford Games as an athlete, volunteer, or spectator, I cannot thank you enough for making our first event such a huge success. My first experience as a Race Director was incredibly fulfilling. Watching streams of runners cascading down the hills and toward the finish line, their goals nearly within their grasps -- it was a memory I'll keep forever, and it made all the work and all the craziness of race directing worthwhile.
And there was plenty of craziness. Take, for instance, The Incident of the Phony Signs:
Our permit for the Games allowed us to begin marking the trails on Friday, so we began bright and early. All day long, Rob and Brandon (two of the other RD's) were driving, walking, and jogging the course, laying out 2200 marking flags, 88 mileage markers, and over a hundred directional signs. Along with getting our Aid Stations and Start/Finish area set up, running a Pancake Dinner, and helping Registration run smoothly, this took us until well into the night. By 3:00 a.m. we were all headed home for an hour of two of sleep before starting again the the next morning.
While Brandon, Kendall, and Rob worked the Start, I laid the traffic cones out on the running lanes, then began running back and forth between the Aid Stations, making sure that volunteers got where they needed to be and that things were well-stocked and moving smoothly. Thank goodness the Big Rapids Area Amateur Radio Club was able to assist us with communications: cell phone reception in Hungerford is almost non-existent.
About 10:00, however, a call somehow managed to get through to my cell phone. It was Rob; he had decided to take the ATV out on the trail for a while to see how things were going. He just happened to go out toward 13-Mile Road and the marathon loop, and noticed that some of the signs seemed to be a little... strange. A little off. He wanted me to take a look at them a minute and see if there was something wrong.
I just happened to be a few minutes away, and I raced out as quickly as I could. If something was wrong, it needed to be fixed right away -- the fastest marathoners would be coming through in a matter of minutes.
Sure enough, some time in the early hours of Saturday morning, some knucklehead (the politest term I can use) had come out to Beech Road and moved all the flags and directional signs. The rearranged signs were perfectly positioned to send runners off onto a little side trail, out into the middle of nowhere.
It was 10:22, fifty-two minutes into the marathon. The race was on. I reorganized the signs and flags at the first intersection, and then rushed ahead to the next one. That one had been redone as well, and the next one, and the next. It only took a few minutes at each intersection, but I could feel the marathoners getting closer. Plus, on Beech Road I couldn't drive much faster than the lead marathoners would run, so I knew they were closing in. My biggest fear was being passed while there were still errant signs ahead, with the possibility that someone might get lost.
Fortunately, once the marathon course returned to 12-Mile, nothing had been tampered with. All the signs and flags were fixed just in time -- thanks to a series of fortunate events.
- Rob happened to head out to that exact portion of the course.
- He happened to have marked that part of the trail late the night before -- so he knew that something was strange.
- His cell phone happened to get reception.
- My cell phone happened to get reception.
- I happened to be close enough to get there in time.
A disaster narrowly averted, and just one of the great stories from the 2013 Hungerford Games.
If you've got an experience from the Games that you'd like to share, e-mail me at hungerfordgames@gmail.com and I'll add it to the canon. Anita -- the winner of the Women's Ultramarathon -- told her story at Running Against the Odds.
Oh, and we already have a couple of well-armed marksmen who have offered to help make sure no one touches the signs in 2014 :-)
