Not all those who wander...want to wander
When planning a race, there are a select few things we don’t spend too much time thinking about. We dedicate about 20 minutes to our finish line soundtrack since we build it from suggestions provided by you, our runners. When it comes to our commitment to providing extraneous food at our aid stations (pumpkin pie, salmon dip, Froot-by-the-Foot), we spend all of 38 seconds in the aisles of Costco.
On the other hand, there are a few things we think about a lot. Months and weeks are devoted to race location, trail quality, viewpoints, shirts and — for the sake of this post — trail markings.
This is about hard decisions and trail markings.
For the Deschutes River runs this year, we were hugely excited but also mindful of our desire to improve upon the inaugural 2018 event. (There will always be room for improvement.) During Deschutes 2018, we had an issue with someone repeatedly altering or removing course flags on a two-mile stretch near the start/finish — a pristine example of trail “vandalism.” They pulled flags before and, yes, during the race.
Clearly, we wanted to prevent the same from happening in 2019. Our plan was to flag this two-mile section late on Friday and, then, “guard” it throughout the race. With this approach, we figured there would be little means and opportunity for trail vandalism to occur.
Unfortunately, our plan failed at step one.
No more than five minutes into marking this section, we actually witnessed someone removing flags. To our best recollection, this person appeared to be the same person we confronted in 2018.
In 2018, we explained to them that the markings were for runner safety and would be removed by sundown. We can only assume our conversation didn’t have a lasting impact because this person was back at it in 2019. When we walked up to this person this year, they pulled out their cell phone and proceeded to have an ostensibly fake conversation. They wouldn’t even make eye contact.
Recognizing that flags were once again removed before the race, we had to assume they’d once again be removed during the race. And, since this person didn’t seem phased by our presence — meaning our guard-the-flags tactic was likely to fail — we decided to not mark this two-mile section at all.
You read that right: We did not mark two miles of our course.
After a lengthy debate among ourselves and a few trusted partners in the trail-running community, we made a really tough decision. In the interest of clearly setting expectations, we decided it was safer to explain to runners a section of the course was unmarked, rather than send them on a trail that might not have the appropriate markings at some indeterminate point in the race.
All of that said, there were a few runners who found themselves turned around on this unmarked section and we feel shitty about it. It was wet. It was cold. You didn’t want to be out there any longer than you had to be.
But we stand by our decision. The runners who got turned around presumably knew they were in a section of unmarked course. They knew that if they followed the river, they’d soon encounter our volunteer, Reid, who was directing runners back to the marked section of trail. This was, after all, the message we hammered home in our pre-race speech.
Course markings are something we think a lot about and consider material to the success of our races. Plan “C” coming in 2020.
Colin & Denis