Nathan Crowder's Staging Area

Everything went fine for the most part, up until the running of the race itself. I pre-registered a few weeks out and had no issues. I did hear from at least one other runner that the deadline for pre-registering online was not accurate, and that because it closed early they were forced to drive up the day before and pay an increased fee in order to register. Packet pickup went off without a hitch the day before the race. Besides a t-shirt, there was no swag except for a few advertisements. But having run lots of races and having gotten my fair share of items that go straight in the trash or to Goodwill, this didn’t really bother me, but it’s worth pointing out. It would have been nice to at least have a few food items (gu, powerbars, etc.) in the packet for use during the race. The first thing I noticed when getting to the race was the timing mat at the start/finish was missing. Our bibs had timing chips implanted behind them, but there was no way they were going to be made useful without a way to activate them. Thus the race was NOT chip-timed. I ran the road portion of the half-n-half which was mostly flat, but did have two fairly significant climbs (one longer and gentle and one near the end that was steep and short). While the portion of the course that bordered the river was nice enough, you have to cross a long busy bridge with lots of traffic twice during the race. You are well protected and separated from the many lines of traffic, but you still suck up a decent amount of fumes from the numerous passing semis and vehicles. On the second part of the course (after crossing back through the beginning) you pass by a wastewater treatment facility and have to breathe in those unfortunate odors for 1/4 a mile or so. Thus if someone was definitely going to enter this event I would recommend they do the trail half. Almost forgot to mention that the race page advertised “famous” and well-stocked rest areas. And while I can’t say for sure on this, I do not believe some of these rest areas carried anything other than water/Gatorade. The conclusion of the race was chaotic and unprofessional. The beer and sodas that were to be available to contestants were nowhere to be seen. I eventually located them at the back of a tent in closed coolers. I’m not sure how many of the runners ever found them. Other than the food truck that was on site, bags of potato chips were all the post-race grub to be had. The lady that was responsible for giving out the prizes for finishers was totally unprepared. She started giving out prizes around 2 hours after the start of the race, but had to stop because she was making so many mistakes in giving out prizes to the wrong runners. Fortunately when the actual winners came forward, the runners that had been given prizes incorrectly were quick to acknowledge and turn their prizes over. She left and went to the start/finish where they were recording the times to try to get more accurate and updated information and said she would return very shortly. She put some poor girl in charge of manning the table that had absolutely no idea what was going on about anything, and was unable to answer any questions about the results or any part of the race. After about 30-45 minutes I had to finally track down the lady and tell her that I needed to claim my prize because my hotel was going to charge me for checking out late if I didn’t hurry up and get going. To her credit she just looked up my name and told me I was an age group winner and to go tell the aforementioned girl manning the table that I had her permission to claim my pint glass. I immediately left after doing so. Many were in similar situations and were frustrated by the lack of communication and poor organization, particularly at the end of the race.