I'm feeling recharged after a quick visit to Rome with my wife's family. Traveling gives me such a valuable perspective on things, and traveling to Rome is a huge dose of "perspective" since it's the city with probably the most accessible layers of history on the planet. We've really only begun to explore Europe despite living here for almost a year. I might jump at the chance to do that race in Turkey this summer, after all . . . even if I'd have to do some swim training to get comfortable with that element of the race.
Anyway, I've been preoccupied with traveling and working so this blog has been neglected. I still have Patagonia posts to finish but this just isn't the proper time -- maybe I'll just never get around to those?
Now that I'm reconnecting with my "real world" responsibilities I'm glad to find registrations spiked for the Untamed New England race next month. It's been a while since an event of mine hasn't filled up well in advance, so this crunch of teams in the final few weeks is both welcomed and nerve-wracking. We hustled to scale back our expenses when it looked like we'd have a 12 team race back in March . . . and now we're double that March figure so it's been a seesaw. I don't have much experience with the last-minute race registration scene, but I suspect we should hold registration open as late as we can to allow for as many participants to get in the race as we can handle. This is just part of establishing a new multi-day race in a new region.
There are certain economies of scale, though, so we need to be careful. For example, if we need 1 UHaul to move gear bins for 25 teams . . . but 26 teams necessitates a 2nd UHaul, that makes the 26th team a very expensive addition to the race. If, after allowing a 26th team, another 5 teams sign up then the cost of that 2nd UHaul is spread across those additional teams and the extra participants becomes more viable. This is the juggling/guessing game we're engaged in right now and a lot depends on how the registration volume looks. I suspect there will be a tapering off soon as we get too close to the race date for teams to make arrangements to get to New England and compete . . . we may reach this point as soon as next week, in which case we'll close the registration and just work with our fixed budget and teams.
Another salient point from the email inbox hell I returned to from Rome: GPS Tracking is the big thing right now for events. I think I've seen 10 press releases or email blasts about GPS tracking for races in the past couple weeks; SleepMonsters announces one thing, then CheckPointZero announces another. It's a cold war of "live tracking." The funny fact is that all these folks are using the same solution: GPS data gathered by SPOTs sourced from TrackMe360.com. Unless I'm mistaken, they all use data from the SPOT website. I don't know that we'll do a press release or our own email blast (although, it's probably good marketing to do it . . . I just feel like people get so much useless AR crap in their inboxes that I err on the side of restraint), but we'll have live GPS tracking for Untamed New England leveraging the same online race infrastructure that we tested with our Swiss event.
My hat truly goes off to TrackMe360 for balancing all the organizations and getting these various parties on board; it's no easy task when SleepMonsters and CheckPointZero are like the Hatfields and McCoys in the world of adventure race media. If you scroll down to the bottom of the home page for TrackMe360, you'll see both the Hatfield and McCoy logos which might be the first time they've occupied the same web space without an explosion! I think if we tucked a USARA logo on there we might create a worm hole to a new dimension or something. I've found the leadership behind TrackMe360 to be pleasant, respectful, and considerate to work with; I'm sure some diplomacy was involved in pulling it all together but there's no denying that making GPS data accessible to races (no matter what series, media affiliate, or whatever) is a good force in the sport. Way to go!
Now, I'm not 100% sold on the effectiveness of the SPOT devices -- compared to the devices we made from scratch last year, the SPOT GPS Tracking offers only a couple data points every hour so it's not like you can track fine orienteering decisions. I got spoiled by our home-made devices from last year that gave data by the minute -- but our devices were too expensive to enable for New England and it'll be good to have a 3rd party provider (TrackMe360) source the devices for us, it lets us focus on the racers and the course instead of the electronics in the waterproof casing. I'm sure SPOT will improve the technology as they go, or Iridium may enter the market and take advantage of their stronger satellite infrastructure. We're just starting to see the dawn of the affordable GPS tracking wave and soon having tracking with a race will be as normal as having race numbers and liability waivers.
OK, that's enough rambling from me for today. It's back to the email inbox hell and "real work" for me . . .