A Race Director's Point of View during COVID-19 with Jamil Coury⎮KoopCast Episode 19

here we go folks with another episode of the KoopCast i'm your host as always Jason Koop and just like earlier in the week this episode is a special covid 19 edition of the KoopCast i dropped two podcasts this week just for you guys and you girls because it is a really interesting time seems like the whole world has changed overnight or at least within the last two weeks and one of the ways that that world has changed is in the space of events and race management races have been canceled left and right they've been postponed runners are having a lot of consternation around what they're going to do for the rest of the summer are they going to get a refund do they want to change their event do they want to go to the postponed event on and on and on and on and on it is unprecedented and so to help navigate these wild waters that we're in right now i brought on no other than ceo of air viper running jameel curry otherwise known as jam jam it was definitely jameel curry though for this particular uh interview we talked about not only what's going on with uh his events over at air viper running but also really race management as a whole and what race directors have to go through to put on events and there's a wide variety of these people some uh

race management companies like jamil's or uh justin's over at mad moose they have a portfolio of events to lean on and other race management companies they might just do one race and that's totally fine they might do it as a non-profit just a service to the community but because of all that in the marketplace it leads to this very disjointed system of what to do whenever a race has to be canceled or postponed do you refund the money do you give them a credit for next year do you give them credit for another race do you refund part of the money and runners out there right now i gotta be honest with you guys some of you are handling this quite well my wife and i we had a few of our races canceled this year and we just went meh okay whatever whatever the policy is we'll go with it but other runners out there are throwing their hands up in the air they're complaining and they're giving they're throwing race directors on the bus they they think that they're entitled to full refund in all situations and on and on and on and on and on and i get it runners you guys train for these events four months and then sometimes years you have travel planned a lot of that travel is non-refundable you've paid your race entry fee and you're super excited about going see your seeing your friends out on the trails but when that race gets canceled a lot of times these race directors they are left with this impossible situation where they can't satisfy everybody all at the same time they can't satisfy

the athletes that are coming to their race they can't satisfy the volunteers and their employees their part-time and full-time employees that might be uh involved in the race they can't satisfy their vendors that they have either fully or partially or are going to pay for things like porta potties and aid station supplies and things like that that are related to the event and they have to navigate these waters these very unprecedented waters with very little blueprint to work from and so to cut through a lot of the clutter and to hopefully illuminate the situation a lot better and to really reduce the consternation that's out there in the running community i wanted to i wanted to peel back the curtain a little bit or i wanted jameel as a domain expert to peel back the curtain a little bit on what he is having to go through with his company and what he thinks about this whole situation and what he's going to do for the future because i think uh one of the things that is going to come out of this is the race management landscape is going to look a little bit different after we see the other side of this there's going to be races that continue to go on and they're going to be races that just go away and that is really extremely unfortunate because these running races as we talk about on the podcast are an integral part of the fabric of our community it's one of the reasons i go to so many races is because i love it i love seeing people i love seeing my athletes go and

race and i love seeing uh the same group of idiots as i so affectionately refer to them at each and every single race weekend after weekend and i'm missing out on that i'm my heart is breaking because i don't get to do one of those things uh that i enjoy so much during the summer so i hope you guys and gals out there pay attention to this conversation with jameel and i hope you come out of it well i'll save i'm going to save my opinions for the outro of this particular podcast just listen formulate your own opinions but do stick around for the exit of this podcast because i'll give you some of my opinions on this whole situation and hopefully we're all going to be a better stronger community out of it so without any further ado here we go the ceo of air vipo running jameel curry how are things going there man i mean it's got all your hair still yeah i mean it's really tough um number one because yeah it's our business it's events and events are canceled so it's and it's a lot of unknowns it's like we don't know how long this is going to go how long it's going to last and so yeah the longer it lasts i think the more stressful it's going to be obviously um but what we're trying to do is you know try and keep our core team um you know we support a lot of people now it's not just me putting on races it's a lot of people involved and a lot of full-time

people so um i think that's the most stressful part yeah for sure yeah i can certainly i can certainly empathize with that so i think what kind of what i want to try to do here is i'm going to ask you to like put on and take off your era vipo hat kind of yeah throughout the course of this because you're you're you're business owner you're also a race you're also you have race directors but i think you can play race director correct absolutely but also i would consider you a domain expert in the in the race management field and so you can speak to a lot of other different situations that race directors are going through that are different from yours because there's all different types of businesses out there when we're talking about uh race management you have you know companies like yours that as you mentioned you have to support a lot of people and there's infrastructure and you guys have a packed calendar which presents logistical issues and things like that and then you have uh you know other race directors they manage one race and it's a not-for-profit race and you know they kind of do it on you know the back of a napkin with a huge you know very uh selfless volunteer base and kind of everywhere else in between and so i think one of the things i want to kind of communicate kind of throughout this is you're gonna have to like take that hat on and off and i think you're relatively comfortable with that yeah for sure okay sweet man cool all right well i know it's like a super

stressful time for you and the whole era viper team there so i really do first and foremost i kind of i appreciate your time because i don't i can't imagine what you and your team's inbox looks like right now um and then you combine that with the planning hurdles that you're now having to face and then you're combining that with the logistical rigmarole that you're having to go through not just on the race planning piece but things having to do with permits and you know aid station supplies and procuring you know services and the like and what i want to do is i kind of want to try to i want to i want to try to lay all that out so that people that are listening can can can really like walk in your race director shoes for a little bit and and not that i'm intentionally trying to create empathy because i think by and large the trail running community they they kind of get it but i do think that a little bit of understanding what's going on and how it's impacting everybody with this covid19 pan uh pandemic i think it's i think it's really beneficial just to like temper down the angst and anxiety and things like that so to set the table up just a little bit this is your aravipa hat you can put your aravipa hat on what why don't you kind of go over what your annual race calendar looks like in terms of the number of events and kind of the number of people that or the number of athletes that

you're servicing through those events yeah on an annual basis yeah yeah i mean between mountain bike races and running races it's probably upwards of 40 events annually and we're servicing i think off the top of my head i think it's over 13 000 athletes in the course of the year which is huge in the trail and ultra world in the north america i mean it can be smaller in comparison to any major road marathon but it's a lot of people yeah and that's one that's one thing that's actually one since you brought that up that's one thing that i do want to bring up is in the trail and ultra running community which is largely what this what the audience is going to be uh primarily focused on it's a little bit different kettle of fish in terms of how race organizers have to manage these cancellations because these big road marathons like the boston marathon new york city marathon and things like that they're going to have one event and maybe in the case of boston where they they service several events but the bigger road events they're going to have one event where they service 10 20 30 40 maybe 50 000 people you have 40 events where you're servicing 13 000 people and one of the things that i think that's important to communicate is not only duh that's different but it pre it presents logistical challenges for moving races around the calendar because your calendar gets packed but also because of like the numbers and the ratios of people that get impacted a lot of times the analogies in the road

running world that we see oh well boston marathon just did this so everybody should just do that a lot of those times those analogies aren't going to quite aren't going to quite hold true in the trail running space so you've got 40 events that are servicing 13 000 roughly 13 000 people out of those events right now how many of them have been just provide a broad overview with how many of them have been impacted by the covid 19 outbreak and then what your general strategy has been yeah i mean in the in the immediate future i think we've had to postpone six six or seven events and we've also paused registration on an additional three or four just because of the uncertainty we don't want to keep kind of building up a liability of people signing up in races between middle of currently we're through middle of may where we've postponed we're kind of all the way through june we've paused registration so the next event that we have that's open right now is july 4th run in silverton the blue ribbon run just because we we want to just take a pause and see and kind of look ahead and you know hopefully we can hold those events as planned and i'm sure people will sign up last minute if they do happen you know but you know we're just gonna take a little break on those so you're taking almost like a rolling approach because you have a calendar of events where you created some break point and you said okay here's our break point right here and here's what we're

going to do before the break point and here's what we're going to do after the break point what went through that calculus right there just determining what events are going to kind of like go on as normal you're going to collect things as normal and then what events you're going to take like special consideration for whether it's postponement or pausing the pausing the registration yeah i guess we're looking for input from people that are more experts than me so uh the immediate one was the cdc recommendation of of uh keeping the no events larger than i think it was 50 people at the time for the next eight weeks so that was like the immediate well we're within that window we just can't do it and then there was the i think was is it ultra sports sciences yeah i forget the that might have been it they they put out a recommendation that was an additional month beyond that till june 15th and so those are the ones we paused and that just happened to be all the way through june since we were close enough anyways so that's that's where we're at with taking those into consideration which is obviously tough for us because you know we're an event promoter our main business is events and we do have events year-round like every two weeks on average so we've scaled everything up not only to try and maintain the highest level of organization for these events but also you know we plan to grow and continue to potentially add or scale and service more runners and you know to say that now we can't

put events on in the short term the midterm is unknown the long term is also unknown it's a tough spot to be in yeah it's i mean i don't know you know we plan and we we we make staffing decisions and everything that we do and forecast you know oh we well there could be a downturn in the economy and some people are going to sign up less and it's like but you know we were i think everyone's blindsided by this and you could never plan this that the entire industry would effectively be shut down overnight i know and that's what's happened yeah it came to a screeching halt like really really quickly and i want to i want to talk about this but to to summarize it jamil like you're taking uh we're going to lean on the experts approach with this you're going to look at the cdc and the uh ultra endurance kind of medical community to a to a broader extent i know marty uh hoffman's group has come out with some specific recommendations but you're looking at them for guidance and saying okay you guys know way more about immunology and you know the viral essence of this particular disease than we do and public health policy and things like that than we do we're going to lean on your recommendations in terms of what to do for our events and we're going to make decisions based off of that yeah that's one factor for sure you know i don't uh i because i think the health and safety is the most important thing and um you know we gotta do our part i think in all of this and

that's definitely a guiding principle it's so tough because i have to balance that with supporting a sizable staff and you know to to cancel events means people are losing hours um and that they rely upon so you know we were trying to hold out as long as we could um until it was clear to us that it wasn't going to be possible i get it man so when did you mention the world came crashing down really quickly and i think everybody's sort of they've experienced that in different ways but for you having to manage a business and then people within that business it's it's a totally it's a it's a totally different situation uh when do you remember when it came crashing down and like what your immediate reactions were um yeah i think it was building in my kind of in my heart i felt like it was growing over time like the right thing to do was to postpone events and then i think it was sunday sunday evening it kind of came crashing down it was i think when that um that recommendation came out of 50 people mass gatherings of 50 people by the cdc and then like our the governor of arizona i think tweeted it out and said like we're following this and i was like okay like that's it like we've got to got to shut down the next two months and we were we were thinking even more like oh maybe maybe we can

get through one more race and make it real safe and self-supported and like cut because everyone we get through it kind of buys us some more time as a company and and then we would maybe cancel or like postpone a couple more and then we kind of when that statement was made it was like okay this is pretty serious and we've got to clear the calendar and for us it was a bit of a scramble to see what what are we going to do for people and you know if we're going to reschedule events when are we going to do that how quickly can we do that and uh move move forward so let's just be really clear though you operate events in which states why don't you just kind of run through them all because different states are going to have different different kind of like levels of lockdown so to speak is what we're experiencing now yeah sure yeah it's like localized for now um yeah mostly arizona we're based in phoenix arizona that's where i'm talking to you from today in my in our office and we have one weekend of events in silverton colorado which is two races over two days and then we have one race in utah okay so the the recommendations that you're relying on and i think this is important for people to understand as well are they mandated by any level of jurisdiction that you have to operate under whether it's at the federal level the state level the local level or even another level that you can you can kind of expand upon or are they just recommended and you're saying we're just taking

the recommendations because this presents this option of is it even an option for you or is it just not an option for you at all yeah great question so it's two parts um there there's obviously the recommendations i think the cdc ones are ones that some states just adopt them instantly so arizona was pretty much immediately adopting it and so that will eventually filter down so that filters down through the different governments and the different agencies so for us a lot of our events are held in maricopa county regional parks like havelina 100 is there most of our events are there so for our event that was supposed to be this weekend um you know i think it was actually two days later we finally got an email from them that said we're working on a two-week rolling basis you know your event can't happen this weekend yeah and so we are taking a longer look approach to this because i don't want to have to do this every two weeks to have to make announcements i just kind of wanted to do it and hopefully we can get through it and then our second phase of the paused registrations was that that's not something that we had to do no one's telling us to do that there's actually still events on the calendar within this eight-week window that are massive events say in april um i don't know what they're doing if they're just waiting to be shut down if they're hopeful this is going to pass quickly but for us for me the biggest thing the like the unknown the limbo like it's hard for me to operate in that space maybe just

personally just as a business so once like the decision was made we went into action and we we like knew what our parameters were and we were just like okay this is the new world we live in we're going to move forward um because we you know we want to survive this as a company as intact as possible as we can be so um that's we're kind of fighting for our lives right now that's what it feels like maybe many people feel that way i don't know well i want to come back to that and you can be as kind of open and transparent as you want to about how it's going to affect your business so you can kind of start to organize your thoughts a little bit but suffice it to say there's a level of things that are mandated but then there's also a level of things that are suggested or recommended by various entities and you as the ceo of ariviper running are having to navigate both of those and i think what what one of the things that makes this challenging is what you just mentioned this level of uncertainty yeah it's easy for the permitting companies to say well we're going to roll on a two-week you know basis but you can't tell that to your athletes right you can't tell that to the people that are coming to race like oh we'll tell you in two weeks what we're going to do we're going to tell you another two weeks what we're going to do or tell you another like that's not like people need to plan stuff you know so you got to operate with both those levels of mandated you know uh mandated restrictions and also recommended restrictions yeah for sure and i mean i've making a last minute decision holding out hope i think i've learned i've learned uh i've made mistakes in

the past maybe um you know even at like black canyon um what was it last year kind of wait until the last minute to decide on our alternate course um you know it all it all turned out for the best um obviously it was obviously the right call but i think it did create a lot of uncertainty for the athletes that i'm not proud of just from an organizational level i don't think anyone was negatively impacted on race day they everyone was safe and and everything but i think it created a lot of stress internally for our staff and that's something i don't want to do anymore well you bring up a really good point jamel like this is not your first rodeo i think that you know i'll give you a little shit because i know you well and i think i could do it like people look at you and they look at the hair and they look at the goofy attitude and you know you've got the jam jam personality and this really cool like social media presence and stuff like that and it's easy to dismiss the fact that you're a really whiz ceo at what you've been able to do i i and i'll i'll i can speak for my own personal experience i've gotten to see endurance events not just trail running events cycling events triathlon events road running events all across the world and all different formats for for 20 years and i always make it a mention when i always make it a point to mention when i see you that i appreciate what you guys do because i can see what goes on or i can understand what goes on behind the scenes to curate an event

with an athlete first focus and you you and your team that you've assembled there does that impeccably but what's relevant to this is as i mentioned earlier it's not your first rodeo do you have any blueprint to like work off of in terms of course you know course reroutes because of some weather event you know fires that happen in the area a permit gets pulled for some bizarre reason we all we all know that that happens for you know a myriad of different things is there anything anything in your experience that you could have that you're now leaning on that's helping you direct the decisions that you're making absolutely and first off i appreciate everything you just said um but second off yes i mean i've been doing this for 12 years now and i think i definitely was drawn to this profession um and not just being an entrepreneur but being you know race directing i think requires a level of problem solving and crisis management a lot of times and yeah we've had i mean countless things and they vary from something that's somewhat minor to catastrophic um i mean i can think back to 2010 across the years when we first took it over and we had 24 hours of rain and it was just the whole thing turned to a sloppy mess and 40 mile an hour winds blowing trying to blow away our tents and that weren't staked down very well

you know that was something that was a small scale event to something large like a you know flash floods in the agua freer river for black canyon that forces a last minute reroute um so yeah this is just a thing on a whole new scale and this will i guess yeah redefine what we do and if we succeed through this it's you know going to be a whole nother set of skills i guess in crisis management yeah i mean i i kind of agree with you like we've got these like little points of blueprints that we might be able to draw from but it's a whole brave new world man um so so speaking of that like all races out there they have a standard cancellation policy and they they vary you know some people are going to refund everything some people are going to run 50 refund 50 up until a certain date some people are going to be able to uh transfer their entry from one race to another and blah blah blah can you just give us an overview of what your standard cancellation policy is and how or if you've uh been able to modify it during this time sure yeah that is the hot topic right now i think for everyone and we're all navigating it on both ends in terms of race directors and companies and runners and we're a lot of us play on both sides i'm a runner too i sign up for races as well so yeah i think our standard is you know no refunds is our our basic thing um in terms of money back but we like to do a lot for our athletes

in terms of flexibility if you can't make it so pretty much standard is is a 75 credit towards any one of our other events within 30 30 days or more before an event so for any reason if you can't come you know 75 of that paid you can use for anything coming up fortunate for us we have so many events that people can apply that immediately to almost anything coming up they can use it and we usually use it a year out so um with if it's under 30 days to 72 hours before the race it's usually 50 percent um usually for not for any reason but like an injury things like that but we're usually pretty flexible people um so yeah that's our kind of standard policy um for this i just felt like um i don't know i just want to do as much as we can do on our end for those affected um but yeah it's pretty intense when you think about losing six events in eight weeks um yeah so for us an outright cancellation or like the idea of refunding that it's it's not really possible we would instantly probably go out of business just because you know the infrastructure we have we've we've been paying salaries for people to produce these events on a rolling basis so that is a lot of that's being spent yes we have some coming in for later but we've got to we've got to come and make these events happen and for me like i want to make the event experience

happen so um yeah basically what we've been doing um for these events that have been postponed is we're gonna do an automatic you go right into the postponed date if you can't make our new date this year you go right into next year so it's like totally across the board you still get to come and run the race you signed up for it just is going to be later than we both had hoped um if you want to switch to a different event like pull out of that one go to another one we're doing a 75 credit so you can kind of i don't want to do that one anymore i want to do this one instead um so yeah that's kind of the the basic we're also doing a virtual run option for people that you know maybe they just want to go out on their own they want the swag let's do this um take it now i think that's awesome can you expand on the virtual run because this is something that's relatively new and i also think it's cool and then we'll we'll circle back to this race cancellation thing yeah i mean we're kind of still figuring it out as we go but essentially it's fine um you know like some people could still at this point we're not in total lockdown in the united states like we you know i'm looking over here and people are driving on the freeway from my office window you know it's like people are still out doing stuff um maybe we shouldn't be but yeah if you maybe people want to go run the course on their own like this sunday um we're going to get them their shirt and their finisher glass and their bib and then they submit their um their race time to us we'll have a virtual result and that'll go for all of our events over this period of time so if they just want to do it now or they can go run it wherever

they live and just do the miles on that day and share their experience cool i think i think that's cool shit jamel um so coming back to your race cancellation policy in essence you're just saying we we want to we want to we want to delay the impact or spread the impact of this somehow some way between postponed events and your other portfolio events you're just trying to spread it around kind of any which way you can and one of the advantages of having a big calendar as you guys have is you guys can do that right i mean you guys have diversification amongst uh the races that you have in terms of distance price point time of year like all these things but but and this is where i'm gonna have to ask you to take off your air vibe a ceo had and kind of talk for race directors abroad or everywhere um not all races are in that position a lot of races have one or two options i personally i have two camps during the summer that i've run for several years and they're in the may time frame and i had to cancel both of them outright i didn't have the option to push them around because of everything else that's kind of going on all summer i don't have the inventory to to to push things around like that so in order to paint this picture of what those other race directors are going through why don't you give a brief summary of where let's kind of like peel back the curtain a little bit in terms of like how how people's money gets spent when they come into a race and when those things kind of get locked into place because i think

what that'll do is for the race directors or the races that might might have just like one or two events on the calendar it just start like not a lot of people realize what happens at what point yeah sure i mean for us i think we are in a unique position because we you know we have kind of a a model like we built a machine so to speak and we're we kind of you know every two weeks we produce an event so it's kind of like we have this rolling infrastructure of everything that happens but yeah i think people so we a lot of times we're very much um we're pretty we're more nimble maybe in in that regards where you know we have like a an ordering system where we kind of order things just in time when we need them so i think we try and keep our costs going just like right we order bibs at this exact point three weeks out from an event or these awards two weeks out from an event whatever it is so we can delay some of those costs some people maybe they're like my vet sells out i get everything done five months in advance and i've spent all that money and it's sitting in my garage at my house and you know yeah you can probably cancel portable restrooms you can you won't have to pay all the permitting fees post event so you're going to save a little bit but also if it's a piece of your income as a sole proprietor or a very small business where it's maybe just a husband and wife it's a small family you know they're they are they could in essence be you know living off some of that income

where they've they've kind of timed it where they are living on that future income or like for the work they're doing leading up to it they're they're not sitting on that lot of cash i think to the last minute um now with that being said you know if there are some savings that came back i think showing that you're willing to take a bit of a hit because i'm definitely gonna be taking a hit oh my god you know let's get that clear we pushed all our events back to the fall we're we're now having an event every single weekend people can't run 50 miles every weekend i mean maybe we all will after this we're all gonna need to but i mean yeah we're our business is gonna be down for sure we just don't know how much um even till next year if we're postponing so we're gonna have to make decisions and and cutbacks but um yeah i think we're what we're trying to do is i know i'm like bouncing back and forth with my hat but yeah i think trying to show that you you what you what you can do for runners i think will be appreciated you know um even if it's um you know a small credit towards next year or something um i'd also don't know everyone's position i'm not in other people's shoes i don't know how they've set things up so i can't i can't fully say what what people should be doing do you do you i'm assuming you operate your business on a pnl basis like primarily yeah just your profit and loss like you're just looking at profit events loss of events and that's how you're making decisions

yeah and but the reason i mentioned that well i mean now it's a lot different obviously because you're thinking more about cash flow but the reason that i present that is a lot of smaller organizations and a lot of smaller race companies to your earlier point they're operating off of a cash flow basis so they open their race up they get all their race right they get all their race reg fees in which is their primary source of income they say okay i'm sitting on fifty thousand dollars whatever the race you know whatever the race is occurring at that point now i'm going to go and buy all of my assets i'm going to go buy the bibs i'm going to go put a deposit down on the timing company i'm going to go buy the awards i'm going to go buy the shirts and things like that but they do it on a cash basis they see the cash come in they have a certain amount of cash they kick the cash out for all of those certain assets and now they're stuck in this position where they can't fulfill on the service that they've promised but yeah they don't have the cash flow to just refund everybody and so they look at it and they're like okay what can we like reasonably afford to like reasonably afford to to refund you're in like a slightly different position because you've got rolling cash flow right you've got events coming in from 40 of them kind of all throughout the year so it's a little bit of a different proposition and kind of what i wanted to get out of that is that a lot of times the smaller race organizations they don't have this big portfolio of income that they're drawing from to to to run their business and that's their right to do it a lot of them just do it they do

it as a non-profit right or they just do it as a service to the community yeah but it's a different business setup as compared to when we're looking at these other big types of events like a concert or the boston marathon or something else where they where they just have a way of of kind of like offsetting the the the refunds or the revenue drop that they're going to see because of whatever cancellation yeah um i don't know what i have to add on that it's good i want to talk a little bit more about like the assets that you do have um and i'm going to bleed this into a kind of question that i got from kim on instagram some of the eight stations supplies that you guys have are perishable some of them are evergreen but some of them are perishable what do you do with the ones that are that are perishable either after an event and they're then you can't use them anymore or during this where you're not going to be able to use them for like eight weeks yeah i mean yes we try and get dialed in on our ordering you know we have a lot of experience every every week or two we have an event so we try and minimize our waste or get things in time where we can use them you know if they don't use this these packages of tortillas at this event they're still sealed good to go for the one in two weeks um but yeah i mean we had i know we have down right now below me in our our warehouse we've got you know being stacked up for damn good run aid stations and then um crown king scramble it's all

right it's all packed and ready to go as it would happen it's all full of you know all the food um actually our staff has just gone home with it so we've divvied it up i went home with a huge box of food so i've got so much stuff right now um yeah that's what we're doing with it the air viper team is on the aid station food diet yeah i mean you can't find some of this stuff in stores so it's good yeah oh my god that's so disgusting um what no i mean for me it was for me it was actually some pretty good stuff and also stuff we've had on hand um even since like across the years just like bags of rice and things like that so we're just trying to clear it out and yeah do you donate any of it to like local food shelters do you ever accumulate that big of a surplus we do sometimes yeah yeah yeah okay um i know that you're not in a position right now that where you're going to actually run a race in the near future but i'm sure that you're starting to put together some procedures in place for your staff for your aid station workers and people that are going to come into contact with the athletes whether it's during registration or the race itself um why don't you like uh why don't you describe a little bit what how you guys are thinking about how this pandemic is going to impact that experience for the athletes yeah that's i think it's gonna be the hardest part of all this as we all kind of get used to this new way of life um i guess fortunately you know in here in 2020 we have things like the

internet and high high speed internet and all these other ways to connect on social media um because otherwise we would be you know out of contact with a lot of people i think so but yeah getting to the races um we were already ready to go with a plan of like this is how aravipa events will go forward from here forward indefinitely and varying levels we never released that because we just had to postpone but you know it's things like um maybe it's a rolling start where there's never more than a handful of people crossing the start line at one point in time there's not a huge packed um corral it's more of a you have a 30 minute window to begin your 26k trail run and you kind of like filter through and then you you spread that out maybe it's we're going to go more of the self-sufficiency model of there's going to be fewer aid stations and there's going to be less offerings already actually at the event we had mesquite canyon a couple weeks ago when you know it was pretty low on the minds of a lot of people here we had already um made major changes at our aid stations so um volunteers had to hand you food you couldn't just dive in we had little dixie cups of m&ms you volunteers couldn't touch your bottle you had to open it up and they had to pour it in so we were already being proactive as we could be um i think our finish line experience is going to be tough once we can resume where

everyone just wants to hug and drink beer together and do all this stuff and it's like that might need to change for the foreseeable future until the world gets a handle on this um but i think i think all of us will be willing to do that just to get out on the trails together just and to be around one another even if we can't do all that again so yeah and where where are you looking to get guidance on that from are you still leaning on the cdc and things that are getting pushed down from the federal state level i mean you mentioned that some of these changes came about even before you know this pandemic kind of took roots like what what are you looking at to to get guidance on that i think i mean i think some of it is just our own intuition on it all you know like how are we going to reduce the spread i think it's also reading about the recommendations that they're saying and i know it's it can change all the time um but i don't know if there's been specifically something out there on guidance of like what to do at an event um i think we're also looking at other larger race companies i know i took a look at iron man's at one point in time they had like a pretty good list of things i was like just like discouraging you know high fives and think even things on the podium and so it's like all things you can do um right now none of that matters of course but i think it will become important as you know some of the guidelines lift at some point and they're saying okay gatherings of such

and such size are okay but i think we all still need to be as cautious as we can for a while yeah well race management i think some one of the reasons that you got into it and what attracts you to it is not only the problem solving but it becomes like a hub of the community everybody's training for an event and those events become this like focal point for hundreds and sometimes thousands of runners at one singular moment in time and they come in with you know themselves obviously but they come in with their family and crew and it definitely is a communal gathering and one of the reasons that i go to to a lot of races is just because i like it i think it's cool i love hanging out with the people at the races i love seeing my athletes uh compete at them and things like that and i want very much for that integral fabric of our community to be to to be maintained as much as possible i want it to to continue but at the same time we know it's going we absolutely know it's going to be disrupted it's going to be disrupted a lot in the here and now and to a significant amount maybe like later on down uh uh down the line what can you say to like to that like what are your predictions in terms of what the race scene might look like six months or a year from now in terms of are we going to have to interact differently are there going to be less you know races out

there because people are going out of business like what are you prognosticating at the end of this tunnel yeah yeah i mean i'm sure there's going to be some casualties in all this um definitely i mean we we could be looking at you know tightening up our race calendar possibly um it's a very real thing um we just don't know right now um maybe a new format of an event is created out of this um that we don't know about yet you know um more of like maybe it's more time trialing or something where it's like you go off one at one or two at a time every couple minutes who knows um you know just because i think people are still hungry for all the things we love about trail and ultra running it's half the time it's like i love getting out there because i just want to be in nature but also know that there are other people doing that at the same time in the same area and i'm still achieving something and there is some level of support that someone's put together so yeah um i think it it could be something like that maybe where it's like we go and set up a course and and some timing and but maybe it's more of a you know a self-autonomous adventure that and i think people are still going to want to do that and and still come together so we just have to see what the world looks like yeah it'll be a shame and i think you think the same way it'll be a shame if we do see some casualties from it whether it's races that you put on or race organizers that just kind of you know

they just throw on the towel and they say i just can't do this anymore because we do we do have a discrepancy between the amount of supply of races that are out there and the demand for trail running races and you're probably aware of the you know the data that came out earlier in the year where it seems like for the last five years it doesn't seem like there is for the last five years we've had double digit growth in trail and ultra running in in north america and because of the permitting uh restrictions that that we have that are pervasive across the country the events themselves can't grow they've got a hard cap and it's usually hundreds of athletes not thousands of athletes and in order to satiate the market that's coming into place you can't grow if you can't grow the event you have to grow the number of events and if you're growing the number of events and some of those start to go the way of the dodo because of the economics of all of this you're even after at the the light at the end of the tunnel is now you have an even greater discrepancy between the demand that you're seeing in the marketplace from the runners that want to go do events and the supply that the people that can offer it which puts even more pressure on the race directors where they have to hold lotteries and you know the yippee to boohoo ratio of people that get in and people that don't so it's going to be you know there's going to be uh flow through uh effects of this that are going to last for a few years because new races are going to need to boot up after this is all said and done to replace the races that that go by the wayside yeah yeah this will be the probably i mean when we

look at ultra running year in review 2020 it's going to be like that nice growth curve and then we're going to see just a cliff in in race finishes and then probably once we can get back to it maybe next year the next year after that it'll be like yeah we should start we should start taking bets on that because you know i think it's like around 140 000 or something like that last year and then i wonder if we could we could probably start a pool that has an over under and submit it to the vegas odd makers and and see what they say unless we can count all these virtual run finishes or something or yeah i mean fkt fkts are going to explode that's what's going to happen i just saw there was um alice and baka on the aeroviper racing team she just went and did a fkt on mount wrightson in tucson it's like i think that's going to become the norm for a while yeah it's certainly going to get a little bit of a spotlight put on it because it's an outlet that you know that people at least as of now and this is to time stamp this just to make sure it doesn't become obsolete four hours from now we're recording this at almost 11 a.m on thursday march 19th at least for now we can still go out in most places not everywhere in most places and still experience the outdoors who knows if that's going to be the case an hour from now a day from now or a month from now yeah all right jamil we're gonna let you go man i know you got emails to get back to you in your inbox and probably a few social media messages and things like that you want to leave everybody with some parting thoughts um yeah i guess just stay hopeful stay strong stay fit wherever you can even if that's running

around your living room or which is becoming a trend now who would have thought um yeah all right man well we appreciate what you do for the community thanks for taking some of your valuable time and and uh coming on the podcast i think the listeners will certainly enjoy it and get back to it man thanks so much all right peace that was it there you have it jamil and i shooting the shit on what's going to happen in the race management community i mentioned from the onset these are really wild and unprecedented times right now but you guys give some give some freaking relief and give the race director some freaking slack on these things i get it a lot of you are hurting out there a lot of you may have lost part or all of your income and to add to the gut punch your race fees that you paid for a lot of it might not be refundable don't take it out on the race directors it's not their fault they're trying to navigate this world just like we all are they have businesses to run they have their own incomes to think about they are really honestly trying to do the best thing for the community to the best ability that they that they are capable of and i realize that's not going to satisfy everybody but nobody's

trying to become a zillionaire off of race management yeah you know a lot of race managers they make decent livings and they're allowed to do that but as jamil kind of explained to me you know kind of off off air and he illuminated in the podcast as well he's taking a hit for this his company's taking a hit they're all feeling the impact there are going to be races that uh that go under there are going to be races that we have come to love and know and we've run year after year that do not see the other side of this tunnel and that's extremely unfortunate so give these race directors some slack give them some space and when the time comes go back to the races people when it's safe and the governments and the permitting agencies and things like that declare this pandemic to a safe level where we can all start going out and doing races again go back out there enjoy it and treasure it and i hope that you all uh just come to appreciate what goes on or what goes into putting on a race and actually the privilege that we all have in participating in these events where we can share the trails and some camaraderie and some shared suffering thank you guys for listening i appreciated a ton i'm going to keep this podcast coming out every week this week was a special one two ones in this week two episodes in this week i'm going to keep them coming out i've had a lot of logistical challenges uh with guests i record about half of these in person and the other half uh remotely which was the case with uh this podcast

with jamil and uh obviously the ones that uh that i had scheduled in person we are uh we've had to postpone if you listen to the last podcast i had two really really cracking ones lined up uh one of them over at the olympic training center talking about uh heat and altitude uh acclimation and the other one with uh usada uh which is here locally in colorado springs talking about doping and ultra running but unfortunately we're gonna have to postpone those i will get them back on the calendar at some point i promise everybody i'm gonna get them back on the calendar at some point but it might be a while because people's schedules are quite frankly all over the place uh so i do have a couple podcasts coming up with a few of our coaches and here's your tease for the day our former intern jackson brill who's also a solomon runner uh he did some cool research recently at the university of colorado having to do with when to run and when to walk and how to determine when to switch between those two modalities uh it's really actually quite fascinating i listened to his honors thesis uh online just recently so i'm going to bring him on we're going to talk about it and have a good time with it so you guys appreciate the heck out of you if you have not had the chance go ahead and subscribe to this podcast on itunes go ahead and give it a rating or a like i'd love to see all those kind of come through it helps out a lot appreciate the heck out of you at some point we'll see you back out on the trails until then stay healthy stay happy and come on give the race directors a break people they're

fighting through this just like everybody else peace out see you on the other side so Thank you.