Douglas Toombs's Staging Area

Goodness, where to start? I’ve run this venue with this company at least once before years ago and I remember everything being pretty much ok. Something must have happened to the company in recent years because this time around the event was an epic train wreck. Dumpster fire.

Honestly, the leadership of the company should be ashamed and embarrassed.

The weather was perfect – blue sky, 60 degrees at 6am. Should be a perfect race day, right? Well, let me just run down the list of how everything a race company could mess up … they seemed to mess up.

Let’s start with the first issue – parking. It’s 0.6 miles away (we measured it). If you’re doing packet pickup and want to run your shirt and wine glass back to your car instead of doing bag check? Yeah, you’ve got 1.2 miles of distance ahead of you, and you haven’t even gotten to the starting line yet!

And let’s talk timing. 7am start – for everyone? What? Every other race with multiple distances runs staggered starts. Especially given that the wine festival doesn’t start until 9am. So you have a good 5k runner who finishes by 7:20 and they just have to sit on their ass for an hour and 40 minutes and stare at the geese in the pond? No, you stagger the starts! It’s not hard at all – Half marathoners leave at 7, 10k’ers at 7:30, 5k’ers at 8 – and basically everyone is back just in time for the festival.

But wait, it gets even dumber!

Early packet pickup is for like 4 hours – 2-6pm the day before the event on Friday. This winery location is about an hour west out of DC, and most of the runners will be coming from DC, and not everyone can just take a half a day off of work to drive out for packet pickup. More competent race companies in the area partner up with local running shoe or sporting goods stores to have packet pickup in multiple areas – what store wouldn’t want to have a bunch of athletes come through their store? So packet pickup for a single 4 hour window at a single location during a work day where most people probably are a 30-60 minute drive away … not ideal.

So, packet pickup the day of? Absolute shitshow! I don’t have exact numbers of course, but visually I’m guessing maybe half of the field of runners didn’t actually cross the starting line at the gun – they were waiting forever for their bib! They had 2, maybe 3 people running the packet pickup desk and the line crawled. Absolutely no excuse for it.

But wait, it gets even worse!

So there I am, I dunno – 7:25, first race ever where I wasn’t in the pack at the start, running along. The course is fine enough, I wouldn’t say it’s the most picturesque, but it’s out in the country so that is nice. Some people complain about it being hilly, I don’t find it too terrible in that regard, but there are some hills.

So I wrap up my 5k, trying to forget the absolute annoyance with every other thing that morning … only to cross the finish line to find more of the same.

Cross the finish line — “congratulations! here’s a small bushel of lavender plants – we ran out of medals! enjoy! someone will mail you your medal!”

ARE. YOU. KIDDING. ME? I’ve literally never run an event where the organizers ran out of finisher medals. Have you? No, you probably haven’t – because it’s one of the most basic things a race company needs to plan, and they completely botched up that one simple task – order enough medals.

I’m never ever going to see that medal. Was someone writing down bib #s of those of us that paid for a shirt and medal and got screwed on half of that deal? I highly doubt it.

And then, here is the piece that really really caps it off. My friend – also in the 5k distance – finished and walked over to the food and snacks table and wanted to get a granola bar. He says he was told – I kid you not – “Oh, sorry – the granola bars are just for the 10k and Half Marathon runners.”

ARE. YOU. KIDDING. ME? Now we’re gate-keeping snacks? Absolutely insane. Again, basic simple things that literally every other race company and venue seems to get right – and this company can’t even manage these simple things any more.

Again, like I said at the start – the executives at this company should feel absolutely ashamed at their execution of this event. But I bet they don’t.

Doukenie as a winery is perfectly lovely. Nice people, nice scenery, nice wines. No one should interpret this as anything negative about them overall. But they should seriously consider whether they want to lend their name to this company once again next year.

They had a bunch of timing correction issues, and then what was really the weirdest was no additional medals or anything for placing in your age category. Or at least, not when our brackets were called (which again would point to extremely poor planning by the company). Again, little bushels of lavender handed out (WTF?). My friend placed 1st in his bracket, got a bushel of lavender and a “2nd place age bracket winner” slip of paper good for 15% off the next run. I placed 3rd in my bracket, and I also got a “2nd place age bracket winner” slip as well.

I’m surprised the executives running the company can even get out of bed and tie their own shoes in the morning. The level of incompetence for a race company is staggering. And you see similar indicators of this in other reviews down below this one, so this isn’t just a one-off.