kirsten yee's Staging Area

I’ve spent years dreaming of running in one of my favorite places on earth – OBX and this year I gathered myself and 6 other family members to run the half (two of them ran the full). The weather was really miserable, super cold and rainy, but we can’t control that 🙂

There were several issues surrounding this race logistically, which is surprising since this race has been going on for several years. The shuttle system to the race was a disaster, we were turned away at the park entrance because “there were no parking spaces” meanwhile my brother who dropped off half the family confirmed the parking lot was empty. My group had to drive to the school and waited 25 minutes with no sign of a shuttle… we had to make a quick decision to drive into the park and have my brother then take the car back to the school.

The race started 20 minutes late – I’m sure the leading factor was that at 7am the vast majority of the runners were still at the schools waiting to be picked up. I can’t imagine how frustrating this was for runners who were standing in the rain an extra 20 minutes before the start.

Finally – the organization for this event was so poor. I’ve participated in several races in the DMV, FL and CA and I’ve never had anything close to this poor of an experience. The packet pickup information – half my family didn’t get emails and the ones that did got them from two different people!! No consistency! Also, personally there was an issue where my time was never tracked even though I scanned my bib at packet pickup, same as everyone else in my family. After reaching out to the event organizer I was blamed for not wearing my bib on the outside of my clothes (it was 50 and raining….sorry) but there were loads of people (several in my family as well) that did not have their race bibs visible, yet their time was tracked. They also claim I wasn’t scanned at the finish when there was a person who stopped me and said he got my scan.

The experience, specifically with Bruce Bokish from PrecisionRacing has been very unfortunate. He’s been abrasive and spent much more time telling me all the things I did wrong instead of just trying to help me. Very sad and disappointed since this has been a race I was super excited about and have wanted to run for years.

I’m not winning any awards for my running. I’m not trying to qualify for anything – I just am grateful to be able to run 13.1 miles.

Looks like there’s some smaller races (still half marathons) in OBX in the spring – hoping to run one of those to redeem this experience!