Celebrating the Best Races of 2024: The Racecheck Awards

With nearly 100,000 reviews collected from participants worldwide, Racecheck is proud to reveal the races that delivered exceptional experiences in 2024.

This year saw mass participation events continue to thrive, with numbers surpassing 2023 levels and gaining even more momentum. The Racecheck platform reflected this surge, with event reviews nearly doubling once again. A record-breaking 205 events qualified for an award in 2024, up from 152 in 2023, 69 in 2022, and 33 in 2021.

But it’s not just about more races — the global reach of the awards has also expanded dramatically. In 2023, Racecheck recognized events from six countries; in 2024, we doubled that number, awarding races in 14 different countries.

This year’s winning races span across:
🇧🇼 Botswana | 🇭🇷 Croatia | 🇬🇷 Greece | 🇮🇪 Ireland | 🇯🇪 Jersey | 🇲🇪 Montenegro | 🇲🇦 Morocco | 🇳🇱 Netherlands | 🇵🇱 Poland | 🇵🇹 Portugal | 🇿🇦 South Africa | 🇸🇪 Sweden | 🇹🇷 Turkey | 🇬🇧 United Kingdom | 🇺🇸 United States

It’s inspiring to see so many new countries recognized, showcasing the growth of top-quality races worldwide.

How the Racecheck Awards Work

Unlike traditional awards, the Racecheck Awards are decided entirely by participants, not by organizers or a selection panel. Events do not pay to be considered. Instead, these honors are awarded based on verified athlete reviews, making them one of the most authentic and respected recognitions in the industry.

Races qualify for gold, silver, and bronze awards by achieving benchmark average ratings based on participant feedback. This means that every awarded event has truly earned its place on this list through the voices of those who experienced it firsthand.

The Power of a Racecheck Award

Winning a Racecheck Award is more than just a title — it’s a stamp of excellence. Events that receive an award earn the right to display the exclusive Racecheck award badges on their marketing materials, social media, and websites. These badges help events build trust, attract more participants, and solidify their reputation within the global endurance sports community.

Below we are proud to present the Racecheck Top Rated events of 2024 by sport type. For a full list of gold, silver and bronze award recipients please visit our awards hub here.

Best of the Best — Racecheck’s TOP RATED

Off-road Running

Beaver Challenge — Big Bear Events (UK)

Road Running

The Christmas Chilly — DB Max Events (UK)

Swimming

UltraSwim 33.3 Greece — UltraSwim 33.3 (Greece)

Triathlon

The Lakesman Triathlon — Lakesman Events (UK)

Cycling

The Great British Escapade — Great British Divide & Escapades (UK)

Explore the 2024 Award-Winning Races

Want to see which other events delivered an unforgettable experience this year? Check out the full list of award-winning races for 2024 by visiting our brand new awards hub and start planning your next must-do event on Racecheck! 🚀

The Racecheck 2024 Awards was originally published in Racecheck on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

For decades, e-commerce has mastered the art of leveraging social proof to skyrocket sales. How? By showcasing unbiased, independent reviews at key moments in the customer journey to build trust and persuade first-time buyers. Now, Racecheck is bringing that proven strategy to the world of mass participation events, empowering organizers to convert curious visitors into committed participants.

As the only platform in the industry utilizing these powerful tactics, Racecheck has delivered remarkable results:

• Unmatched ROI: Some organizers have seen returns exceeding 30x.
• Impressive Conversion Rates: Top-performing events boast a 42% conversion rate from review widget interactions to bookings.

These are not anomalies — they are the result of applying customer behavior science to event marketing. We’re not reinventing the wheel; we’re refining and tailoring it to meet the unique needs of the active experiences industry.

Here’s how a Premium Racecheck Subscription can unlock the full potential of social proof and participant reviews to elevate your events to new heights:

Racecheck Premium Review Box

At the heart of our premium offering is the Premium Review Box, a seamless solution that allows participants to write and read reviews directly on your website.

• Engage Participants: Highlight what makes your event unique and build trust with authentic, independent feedback.
• Boost Registrations: An always-visible “Register Now” button directs readers to your registration platform, turning interest into action effortlessly.

Racecheck Premium Review Carousel

For customer who prefer to showcase reviews in the form of a static banner within their websites and sales channels, we have the option of a review carousel that is fully customizable and responsive in mobile.

Racecheck Smart Questions

To extract even more valuable and to-the-point feedback from your participants we launched our own take on post-event surveys. Our algorithms now dynamically monitor how a participant is reviewing an event in real-time, prompting a smart question to dig into the details and insight you need. For example, let’s say you get mostly 4s and 5s out of 5 for most review criteria, but one stands out as an outlier. Our algorithm will dynamically create a question targeting that specific criterion.

The answer is shared privately with the organiser through their Racecheck Dashboard and is not part of the public review.

Rich Snippets for Search Engines

Stand out in search results with Rich Snippets displaying your star ratings.

• Drive More Traffic: Enhanced search engine listings can lead to a 20–30% increase in organic clicks, giving you an edge over marketplaces leveraging your reviews for their traffic.
• Establish Authority: Add credibility to your listing and protect your organic audience.

Note: While the timing of snippet visibility is dependent on search engines, we’ll work with you to optimize your site for faster results.

Social Content Generation Made Easy

Don’t have a full-time marketing team? No problem!

• Instant Social Posts: Create and share engaging posts from real, independently collected reviews across any platform in any format.
• Leverage Authenticity: Participant reviews are powerful marketing tools, and now, sharing them takes just seconds.

Comprehensive Analytics and Sales Tracking

Understand the direct impact of your reviews on registrations and sales.

• Track Performance: Monitor how many people read reviews, click “Register,” and complete purchases.
• Simple Setup: A few lines of code on your website enable robust tracking, and our team will guide you step-by-step if needed.

Advanced Review Management

We ensure your reviews remain authentic and relevant.

• Genuine Feedback Only: Only participants who started your event can leave reviews — no spectators or external parties.
• Proactive Fraud Prevention: Algorithms detect and flag fake reviews, and you can report any suspicious activity through your organizer dashboard.
• Bib Number Verification: An extra layer of authenticity ensures feedback is from real participants.
• Delayed Publishing: We delay the publishing of reviews by 24hrs to allow you the opportunity to flag a review as inappropriate or to follow up with the reviewer in case they may want to modify their review.

Additional Features

Our suite of tools includes:

• Unlimited replies to reviews
• Detailed analytics and reports
• Resources to simplify review collection

These features streamline the entire review process, making it effortless to gather, showcase, and act on participant feedback.

Ready to Make 2025 Your Best Year Yet?

Harness the power of your participant reviews to drive growth, boost sales, and build credibility. See the difference for yourself with a free trial.

📩 Contact us at sales@racecheck.com to get started today!

Unleashing Growth: How Racecheck Premium Drives Registrations and Boosts Event Success was originally published in Racecheck on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Fake reviews are a growing menace, undermining trust and authenticity in online feedback. These fabricated testimonials not only create an uneven playing field but also erode the goodwill that binds communities together. Here’s why they matter and how Racecheck is tackling the problem head-on.

The Far-Reaching Impact of Fake Reviews

Phony reviews create a ripple effect of damage:

• They plant seeds of doubt in the minds of potential customers.
• They inflate reputations of products or events unfairly.
• They harm competitors by lowering their ratings or tarnishing their credibility.

In essence, fake reviews corrode the trust, support, and sense of community that are vital in the racing world. A recent Racecheck survey found that 85% of respondents write reviews to help others make informed decisions — an altruistic motive worth safeguarding.

Honest Mistakes vs. Intentional Deceit

Not all misleading reviews are malicious. Sometimes, they stem from simple errors, like spectators leaving reviews intended for participants or feedback mistakenly associated with the wrong event. While some of these inaccuracies are easy to identify, vague details can still skew overall ratings.

Racecheck actively works to manage these misplaced reviews, ensuring their platform remains a trusted resource. For example, reviews from non-participants or local residents venting about unrelated grievances are swiftly removed to preserve fairness.

Consumer Skepticism Is on the Rise

Trust in online reviews is dwindling. According to BrightLocal’s 2022 Consumer Review Survey, only 7% of consumers claim they are “not at all” suspicious of reviews on platforms like Facebook. Yet, reviews remain a crucial tool, with just 2% of people reporting that they never read reviews before making decisions.

Modern consumers are more discerning, reading multiple reviews and seeking a balanced perspective before committing. This growing skepticism has a silver lining: businesses that consistently receive positive feedback can demonstrate authentic reliability. At Racecheck, the Review Box provides organizers with valuable insights into consumer interactions, helping build long-term trust.

The Role of Media and Big Tech

The media has spotlighted the issue of fake reviews, with stories about review farms flooding platforms like Amazon. Similarly, Meta’s Community Feedback Policy aims to combat fraudulent feedback but may inadvertently deepen distrust until it proves effective.

The influence of fake reviews, however, is often fleeting. They might succeed in the short term for quick sales, but they fail to sustain credibility for ongoing events. Race participants value real experiences, and events that don’t deliver on their promises risk backlash. Simply put, fake reviews are a shortcut to failure.

How Racecheck Is Combating Fake Reviews

Racecheck employs a multi-faceted approach to protect the integrity of its platform:

1. Encouraging Race Numbers
   Participants are prompted to include their event number when leaving a review. While optional, this adds a layer of verification.
2. Automated Screening
   Offensive or out-of-place content is flagged automatically for review.
3. Random Checks
   The Racecheck team conducts periodic checks, especially for events with unusual ratings, contacting reviewers when necessary to ensure legitimacy.
4. Organizer Reporting
   Race organizers can flag questionable reviews via their dashboard, triggering an investigation by Racecheck. Reviews that violate terms are removed promptly.
5. Delayed Publishing
   For our premium customers, we implement a 24-hour delay before reviews are published publicly. This provides organizers with the opportunity to identify and flag illegitimate reviews before they go live, while also allowing sufficient time to connect with customers who may have left an unfair rating.

Building Trust in the Age of Doubt

Despite growing skepticism, trust can still be cultivated with consistent effort. Google reviews remain highly influential yet easy to “game”, with the platform commanding an 87% share of the search engine market (Statista). Tools like Racecheck’s Premium Review Box allow race ratings to appear as rich snippets in search results, enhancing visibility and credibility.

Facilitating reviews is only part of the equation. Actively promoting them and ensuring their authenticity are equally vital. Racecheck’s proactive measures not only safeguard the integrity of feedback but also reinforce the trustworthiness of its racing community.

By tackling fake reviews with diligence and transparency, Racecheck demonstrates that authenticity is not just a goal — it’s the foundation for long-lasting relationships and success in the competitive racing industry.

Racecheck offers a fast and effortless way to gather reviews and participant feedback. The platform empowers race organizers to transform this feedback into a powerful tool for boosting sales and driving traffic. Discover how to make the most of race reviews by exploring the Racecheck Organiser Dashboard.

Read some of our recent articles that explain how you can harness the power of reviews to help grow your races:

• What is a Racecheck Review Box and why does it make a difference to event sales?
• Racecheck Survey: How do reviews impact race sales?
• Why all race organisers should care about reviews
• The team behind race review platform Racecheck
• How Racecheck reviews are helping race organisers with insights unique to their sport
• Racecheck reveals 2021 award winners
• Racecheck tips: grow your online race bookings by reducing shopping cart abandons
• Racecheck tips: 5 ways to make your race more sustainable
• Organiser tips: 5 ways reviews will improve your race

Fighting Fake Reviews: Protecting Authenticity and Trust in the Racing Community was originally published in Racecheck on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Nick Tuppen is on a mission to empower people with the belief that “More is in You”. Despite landing in the events industry by chance, he has led Threshold Sports to become one of the most aspirational operators of experiences and mass participation sports events in the UK. Threshold’s growth is an expression of Nick’s deeply held values. Emphasizing the importance of culture, investing in people for the long term and relentless attention to detail.

This conversation uncovers numerous insights about what it takes to run a successful business in mass participation sports and a business that can stand the test of time. Grab a coffee and dive in!

Alexander Tanti: Let’s jump right into it. I’d love to hear more about your background. What did you do before, and how did you end up in the position that you are?

Nick Tuppen: Yeah, so before joining Threshold, which was 12 years ago, I had no background in events at all. No experience or anything like that. My first proper job was working in marketing at Diageo, a big drinks company, where I was an assistant brand manager and brand manager for Pimm’s and Gordon’s Gin. I had a few years there, which was great to get a grounding in solid marketing principles. I then took some time out to travel, so I went around the world without flying for about 20 months with a mix of cycling, hiking, sailing boats, trains, and hitch-hiking, and then worked for a year at a small agency doing strategy consultancy. But then an old Diageo colleague, Penny, tapped me on the shoulder and said there’s a marketing job going at Threshold. I ended up having a pint with the founders around the corner from their office in Covent Garden and haven’t really looked back. I didn’t plan to work at Threshold, hadn’t been looking for a role in events or anything like that, and certainly hadn’t expected to be in a position of leading a business. But it was one of those things where I got a foot in the door, I love the outdoors and adventures, and I took it from there.

Alexander Tanti: And what made you quit your previous career and go travelling?

Nick Tuppen: It was influenced by many people, older and wiser than me, saying they wished they had done a big trip before the restrictions of kids, mortgages etc. And once you’ve heard enough people say that you think, “Well, maybe this is as good a time as any.”

Alexander Tanti: From the nature of your travels, you sound pretty active and adventurous, so the world of experiences did attract you in some ways. But what I’m more interested in when speaking to organisers, especially highly successful ones, is that everyone tends to have a very strong why or reason driving them forward. Obviously, there’s a monetary aspect to it, but it’s seldom the main reason, especially so when the organisation is successful. Some other key ingredients and drivers really manifest in these incredible experiences for people, so I’m interested in knowing what that is for you.

Nick Tuppen: When I joined Threshold I liked events, and I liked adventure. It was something I was passionate about. That was a good baseline. The thing that’s kept me in the industry and kept me excited and motivated every year for the last 12 years is being around the people and the culture. The culture of the industry to an extent, but also the culture which I walked into when I went to my first Threshold event.

Personally, I believe working for people you respect is fundamental. I want to work hard. I’m not looking necessarily for the easy path. But I want to be working for people I can learn from, people I respect, and who, in turn, are kind and keen to support your development.

My first experience of a Threshold event was the Ride Across Britain. It is a beast of an event; ten days on the road, 800 cyclists, a couple of hundred crew, and I joined for the last couple of days when they were riding toward the end. I had just joined and saw a team of people operating to a really high standard. There was amazing attention to detail and customer service, looking after those people on this amazing, physically exhausting journey. But, there was also a really healthy respect between the participants and the crew. You could tell that everyone was working hard for everyone else. That’s the culture that I like being a part of. A high-performance, high-support culture.

Alexander Tanti: And it feels like that culture remains in place today. Congratulations on the Racecheck award that your team won for Endure24 — Reading. What was very interesting and quite impressive, reading through those reviews, is the personal impact the marshals and event directors had on participants. They had created this very intimate relationship with the people running the event, which is very rare. And there were endless mentions about marshal supervision and just the care and atmosphere that has been created in the event, so it certainly feels like this is your brand’s superpower as it seems. I guess that culture that you landed in, you’ve managed to bring forward and distribute to the rest of the organisation.

Nick Tuppen: Yeah. It’s fundamental to what we do. We talk about being a service business. The brands of the events are important, but ultimately, we are in the service of participants. We’re in the service of clients, sponsors, and partners. And the root of all that, the mantra and purpose of the business, is using these events to unlock potential in people. It’s built around a belief that more is in you. If you are inspired to take something on you will often be able to achieve something beyond what seems possible when you first consider it. But this is all reliant on providing amazing support for those people who sign up to do an event with you.

We love longer events. So we don’t really do 5Ks, 10Ks, but rather 100ks where you’re with people for 24, 36, 48 hours. Ride Across Britain, you’re with people for nine days, and you build relationships with your participants on those events. All those touchpoints from a well-drilled team who buy into the culture of support means that everyone at those events, or a large number of those people, will have had interactions which help them through difficult spots. And these participants always talk about the role of the crew in helping them complete the challenge they’ve potentially trained for years to do. It’s a people’s business at the end of the day.

Alexander Tanti: I love the tagline “More Is In You.” Have you also participated in events where you experienced that feeling after finishing a very difficult challenge, where you thought, “ Wow, this has just taken me to a whole new level?”

Nick Tuppen: Yeah, I used to do a lot of rowing back in the day going up to Junior World Championships and a high standard at University. That involved training six days a week, twice a day for seven months. That’s probably as hard as I’ve been pushed, as hard as I’ve pushed myself, and that was all building up to one race a year where it’s a binary win or loss at the end of it. There’s an enormous amount of pressure in terms of preparation, selection, ongoing training, cumulative fatigue. Since then, there have been moments where I’ve done challenges and events where you find yourself in a similar position. However, I don’t seek it out as much anymore. There’s less of an urge to really go deep into that kind of dark place. It’s not really what I’m looking for in my life at the moment.

I’d say I spend a lot of time dancing around that edge of physical endurance and exploring all of those emotional states. There are still bits of me that are tempted every now and then. One of our clients is Vodafone, and they just had some teams row around the Atlantic, which has a certain appeal to it. But as I’ve got two young kids, aged eight and ten, there’s a big sacrifice. What I choose to do now affects many more people around me than it did back in the day. So, while I’m sure there are some opportunities on the horizon which could take me back to that place, I’m not courting them at the moment.

Alexander Tanti: Understood. I’ve got a two-year-old and another one on the way, so I know what you mean. But running a business can also stretch your mental, emotional and sometimes even physical capabilities in many ways.

Nick Tuppen: I never expected to be in a position of having responsibility for a business like Threshold. I joined as a junior marketing manager and kept putting my hand up to pick stuff up. If I look at what events represent to some people, it’s filling a gap to where they are pushed to their limit. There will be some people whose job is very much within their capability, and they don’t get that sense of stretch. But personally, the combination of having kids, navigating Threshold through COVID, and even post-COVID with the events industry still experiencing aftershocks is another way of being stretched and challenged in a way that I’ve never had in the past. It’s a hard game out there, and some events made it through each year, but after a while they just say, “Look, I’ve taken enough of a beating. I love it, but it’s not worth the emotional rollercoaster.” That “More is in You” piece doesn’t have to reference feats of physical endurance, necessarily. There are loads of different ways of being challenged to that degree, whether that’s getting up at three in the morning to look after a kid who’s feeling ill or dealing with a work emergency.

Alexander Tanti: Indeed, it can apply to any sort of life situation, just going beyond what you think is possible. The first triathlon I finished was a life-transforming experience for me. I was always active but not to the extent that I thought I could finish a triathlon. But, speaking about experiences and extraordinary challenges, etc., Threshold does feel more like an “experience” provider rather than a more traditional race organiser. You don’t see much language or branding throughout the website about performance, PBs, or fast courses. It’s more about spectacular landscapes, challenges, and more importantly, impact on health and well-being. Do you see a general shift towards these kinds of adventure and experience-themed events versus the more traditional performance-driven events in the past?

Nick Tuppen: Yeah, that’s certainly the case in certain areas. If you take the example of cycling in the UK, in 2012 with Wiggins and the Olympics, we saw a big boom in road cycling. But that was very much road biking. That then went through a cycle where the dynamics changed, and road cycling almost became a victim of its own success. You end up with these ultra-fit and fast stereotypes surrounding these sports, which can be off-putting for normal people to get into. You tend to see that if you have a really passionate group of people at the heart of it, then anyone who’s coming to the sport just looks at that group, and if you don’t fit in with that, it can feel elitist. You then saw people going into mountain biking, which has always been around, but this kind of hybrid gravel biking and bike adventuring felt very different. It took away some of that competitive piece, and people participate on their own terms again. You got away from busy roads, you got to explore new landscapes. It’s been matched in road running with trail running. People pull different threads as to why. There is a piece where finish times become less important. When you’ve been trail running, or have finished a trail half marathon, no one asks you what your time was because it’s irrelevant. So you’ve seen the removal of that competitive and clearly ranked baseline competition for lots of people. It becomes more of a competition against yourself, on your own terms, where you can go to beautiful places which are less crowded. You see it in swimming, from pools out to open water swimming, cold water swimming. So there’s a general trend towards nature. Which may be reflected in climate awareness and the protection of beautiful places. It could be due to Instagram and photography of people in beautiful places that look more enticing, possibly, than someone on the road. So, there are a lot of themes that can be linked to that.

The competitive piece is still there. The top end of trail running is getting far more competitive. You’ve got more coverage of elite-level races for example. The fascination with competition and pushing your limits is still there. But I think the movement to natural environments probably holds a broader appeal. At the same time, you’re seeing a resurgence, despite the growth of trail running, of the big city centre marathons and half marathons post-COVID. I think people still love that big-day atmosphere. Closed roads in the middle of a city with many people cheering is unique. And also, it’s convenient. It is in a city.

So we’ve got this odd thing where I think more people are trail running, doing it in smaller groups and communities, but the overall growth of running from an events perspective is broad across all types.

Alexander Tanti: Many organisers do a really good job of creating a brand out of individual events, but not many of them do a very good job of creating a brand out of the organisation as a whole. I think Threshold has managed to do that very, very well. Was that a conscious effort, or was it just a byproduct of these great events gradually being associated with the name Threshold?

Nick Tuppen: I’d love to say it was brilliantly planned from the start, but that would be misleading. We’ve always felt that individual event brands are critical. There’s a temptation, as you grow, to feel like everybody wants to do a Threshold event because you have those loyalists who keep coming back. The reality is that the vast majority of people are not loyal to the company itself. They will choose one event over here, then another event in a different country, do this, do that. There are so many great events and so many great event organisers out there that people will pick and choose and move between them.

I think we’ve seen situations where companies believe their parent brand is strong enough to get everybody to come to them because they believe in the central event organizer brand. So we’ve grown the Threshold brand, I think, as a secondary priority behind trying to build event brands and getting them well-known. The reason it has gradually built awareness is probably because of the variety in the portfolio.

But the other part is the second half of our business, along with our public events, which are the events we deliver for other people. We deliver the Macmillan Mighty Hikes, we’re going to be delivering the British Heart Foundation London to Brighton ride along a lot of others so there’s a whole range of stuff we do for other corporates and charities. And I think from a B2B perspective and a partnership perspective, there’s an awareness which is driven for the Threshold parent brand across that side of the market, which if you’re outside of the industry you’re probably less aware of. The amount of time we’ve spent delivering events to the highest standard, plus that B2B part of the event business has been established over time.

Alexander Tanti: So for an organiser who has a portfolio of different events, you would say, especially if their angle is more B2C oriented, you would advise them to keep that focus on each individual event, and that brand identity will gradually come rather than the other way around?

Nick Tuppen: I think so. And there are some movements in the market at the moment where people like small independent brands. So, if you look at running brands, you’ve got your big established players, but we’ve partnered with brands who are based out of specific regions and are amazing for specific products. Their advocates wear that brand with far more pride than they wear the big-name brands because that feels like a brand they’ve discovered.

So similarly with events, if people can feel like they’ve discovered something, or they were there at the beginning, or they can build a personal relationship with an event, they feel loyal and supportive of that.

With consolidation happening with larger event series and companies at the moment, it will be interesting to see if leveraging central parent brands works for or against them from a brand affinity perspective.

For example, if I’m going to do a ride in Italy, which is based around a local town, I want that to feel connected with that community, the identity of that event to be really specific to the area, the local community, the local organizers, because that will be a differentiated, memorable experience. So, for all of those reasons, I look at the Threshold brand as being like a stamp of quality. But if we’re doing an event based in Cornwall, I want it to be as Cornish as you can make it and use local suppliers and all that local insight and flavour, because otherwise, it just feels like you’re bulldozing in with a one-size-fits-all approach.

Alexander Tanti: Too much dependence on the brand can also be a huge risk factor. I remember from personal experience that I once did a triathlon with a very big brand name, and it was a great experience. But then I chose to do another one of their branded events in Rome, which was an absolute disaster that completely put me off the brand. I could no longer trust that the same quality could be maintained across all events.

Nick Tuppen: I think it varies depending on the IP and the structure of the event. So, in the case of Tough Mudder where you are creating something unique, it makes sense to have a parent brand because the location doesn’t matter. They effectively drop in their event concept into a space, and they can do that anywhere in the world. But running and cycling and all those where you’re outdoors, then the route itself or the landscapes play a role. I think those brands are much harder to centralise in that way.

Alexander Tanti: Your organisation has a B2B angle and a B2C angle, and you seem to do both very well. A lot of organisers try to do a little bit of everything, and they end up being quite average in both. How do you manage to do that so well?

Nick Tuppen: Probably learning from mistakes. It’s not like we haven’t made plenty of mistakes. So, you know, don’t always trust what you see on LinkedIn. It’s not always reflective of what’s going on in the background. A lot of it comes back to culture and good people. The principles that we apply to our client event portfolio, working with our clients, and delivering for clients aren’t different from how we approach our own events. So, we are not operating two different organisations regarding culture, approach or delivery styles. We try and make everything as consistent as possible, from reporting through systems etc. So that allows us to move between one and the other (B2B <> B2C) more easily, which, from a business perspective, gives us a bit of protection. But the principles behind how we run events and what we think matters for events are the same across both. And I think that keeps things simple. We can bring someone into the business, and they hopefully pick that up quickly, allowing them to build momentum faster. But yeah, understanding your product and what you’re doing is important. I think it is good to have people who love the events, but it’s definitely not mandatory. You can have lots of people who can be brilliant at a range of things. They can be a brilliant account director who is fantastic at looking after clients, someone who’s a sponsorship expert, or someone brilliant at X, Y, and Z. You don’t have to have run a marathon to be able to understand what’s going to work well for a sponsor and a partner. We speak to quite a few events companies and they go, “Right, we need to hire runners if we want to be able to put on great running events,” which is true for that core product. But actually, to grow and be commercially sustainable, you need to develop your understanding of sponsorships, you then need to develop your understanding of marketing, and you need to understand good financial processes and systems.

There are many people who’ve entered this industry thinking they’re going to make money and got their fingers burnt. If you really think about it, it’s relatively easy to put on a great event for a participant. You get a great venue, good delivery, good suppliers and the basic operational delivery piece right and you can end up with a really good event. The hard bit is making that commercially sustainable. You know, it was hard pre-COVID. But it’s really tough post-COVID. When we talk to the team, we try and empower everyone to understand their individual impact on the commercial performance of an event. There may be a great purpose behind wanting to do more events. But if it’s not commercially sustainable, we’re we’re playing at running a business basically. So, that piece of what goes into making commercially sustainable events has always been right at the heart of how we approach the business. I think that allows us to then maintain that continuity and build year after year.

Alexander Tanti: I think that’s a huge learning, to be honest. It does not necessarily mean you need to look within a specific community related to your product to get the necessary talent. It may be out of necessity, that smaller organizers with fewer resources and capacity to recruit from a wider audience tend to rely on their community for support, which might maintain a sort of small-scale mindset. But from your perspective, it looks like an organization at your level differentiates by not being shy to bring in people from completely different backgrounds, as long as those core skills are exceptional.

Nick Tuppen: When we started, Threshold wasn’t a big company, and we did a lot ourselves, including in-housing a lot. We spent a lot of time learning how to do things ourselves. So, you don’t have to go out and find a six-figure CMO from some tech startup or something like that. Instead, learn as much as you can, go and talk to people, read blogs, read websites, follow marketing experts, and find people with a passionate interest in that topic. We’ve hired a lot of junior people who then come through and grow within the business. So, yes, certainly in the early days, we didn’t hire event experts or sponsors; we didn’t have a big team with all this expertise. We spent a lot of time going back to school, essentially teaching ourselves, and then pushing each other to figure out if it was working or not. And ditching things if they weren’t working.

Alexander Tanti: One thing that you guys stand out with is publicly celebrating your interns and junior roles, and I guess that speaks volumes to the importance you give to bringing in people who are willing to learn. You do need people who are very eager and driven to learn to be able to accomplish any sort of expertise, especially if you’re not necessarily looking to hire really expensive people. So that brings me to the next question, which is, what’s the common denominator across your team members? Would you say that eagerness to learn and humility?

Nick Tuppen: Yeah, we try to keep the egos out of it as much as possible. That is important. With our work placements students, they come in for their third year of university. It’s a sandwich year, combining work with studies, but quite a few people return after graduating. So, Brooke, who’s running our large community programs in our marketing team, came through the work placement program. It’s a real test of your culture, how someone can come in, and how far they can develop within a year. You get to see people who come in for work placement and the confidence they’ve built by the time they’re on their way out and the amount they’ve done is huge. You realise how green some of the team are when they come in and that also keeps the older members of the team, who’ve been around for a while, keeps them fresh. You’ve got some really engaged people who end up pushing the older team members to up their game and come up with new concepts and be innovative. So it works at both ends. Everyone’s performance is lifted when you get good young people coming in. They’ve got that curiosity and hunger and desire that is contagious.

Alexander Tanti: Are there any functions within the organization that you’re especially keen on maintaining in-house rather than outsourcing?

Nick Tuppen: It’s a very difficult question because, if I think of all the different teams there’s value within all of that, but it’s not very helpful as an answer. From a marketing perspective, staying close to your participants or consumers is really important. So if you are a small team making sure those people who are tasked with the operational delivery of the event have got their finger on the pulse of how the event is being talked about is really really important. Because if you understand participants well, you will naturally begin to meet their needs and spot opportunities. There are technical elements of marketing, such as creative asset development or running paid social media campaigns, where it’s a very technical skill and you might want to bring in freelancers for that. But to just outsource and say, “Can you recruit 1,000 people to my event?” and giving that to an external agency, I think there’s a lot of marketing agencies who will talk a big game on event recruitment, but then really struggle when it actually comes to it.

I think you must identify what your key relationships are for your organization. So if that is permissions in key venues, you wouldn’t want to outsource to a freelancer because they can come and go, and you feel like you’re losing that connection, or those key stakeholders don’t feel valued. You could probably look at it and go, “What are the elements where if we dropped the ball on this, it would be a fundamental issue for the business?” And you can then probably sketch out four or five things and go, “Well, how do we maintain a level of control over that?” So, yeah, venues, and permissions. It might be a key sponsor, it might be marketing… So take your pick of what those are, but elements that rely on ongoing relationships and deep understanding of stakeholders’ needs…I’d be nervous about outsourcing.

Alexander Tanti: Regarding sponsorship, if a smaller organizer came to you and said, we’re looking for sponsors. Is there any advice or suggestions you could make for reaching out successfully to sponsors and creating relationships?

Nick Tuppen: I mean, reach (how many people an event can reach with its communications) is a blunt tool, and it’s also something a lot of marketing brand managers and brand directors will look for straight away. It’s also one of the weaker cards that event organizers can play because if you’re looking at bought media, you can suddenly get lots of zeros on your reach. But in reality, there’s very little engagement with those numbers. So leading with the reach of an event is a hard sell. But we always look at it and go, “You have, depending on the event, a three month, six month, nine month, 12-month window to talk to participants, and for a brand to play a role within there.” So compared to something where you drop in, and you get one or two contact points, a brand can partner with your event, and then communicate with a participant all the way through. So I would be looking at what brands or categories the participants in your events use. There’s real value in there. It’s easier to sell, and you can add value for the participants.

So, we’re working with Harrier, who do a whole load of great stuff but particularly around trail running kit and equipment. Now they have a lot of really good content to prepare our participants for running a 100k or a 50k. So we have a credible way of integrating them into that journey, the same way with High5 sports nutrition. Done right, you can get the participants using the sports nutrition they’re going to have on a live event, you’ve got someone buying that all the way through for nine months building a good relationship with them. So, I would start with the depth of engagement rather than the reach. As you get a bit larger, or that reach of your events does extend, or you build out a marketing function, or a partnerships function, you can then begin to do more specific activation for a wider range of partners.

For example, we’re doing a whole campaign, Ultra 50:50, trying to level to get more women on the start lines of ultramarathons. That’s a big campaign we’re running with a purpose-led angle. However, it is something you can talk to brands about. We are using it to look for partners who want to partner with something bigger than just a race. By partnering with a campaign which resonates beyond trail running, you can talk to any brand championing diversity and inclusion. So, you start with what you do best, and then, as you grow, you can look to build out and take on potential media campaigns and challenges and causes, which can open up more doors.

Alexander Tanti: That’s very interesting, and it actually reminds me of something that Tom Kerry also said, that organizers do need to play the long game, and they need to bring in sponsors and activate them throughout the journey of their participants. It’s not just a banner on an email and feel that you’re adding value. You really need to know your participants, what their day-to-day is like and how you can bring in sponsors that can support them in that day-to-day all the way through to the event. So yeah, I think that’s super helpful.

I think I have time for one more quick question. How do you see the next 5–10 years in the industry in terms of consolidation? Do you think that there is room for smaller players to stay independent?

Nick Tuppen: It feels like the direction of travel is pretty one-sided at the moment. And again, I’m talking about the UK market more specifically here. I think there’s a few different things going on. We’ve had a good run with lots of people developing really good events in the run-up to COVID. They’ve grown them passionately, they’ve looked after them, then COVID just smashed that into pieces. So you’ve got a load of brilliant event organisers in the small to medium-sized space who are just going, “I loved it; but it’s not worth doing anymore. So I’m going to get out.” I think we will lose a chunk of good operators out of the market because it’s hard going, especially if you’re hands-on and on the ground at the events. It’s a hard, stressful, difficult job… it’s brilliant, but it’s not easy. So I think we’re going to lose a lot of people who underpinned small to medium-sized events previously. Then, I think a chunk will get swept up into large organisations, and the jury’s out on whether that’s in the interest of consumers or not. Usually, there’s a general rationale that good events, which are the ones that tend to get bought, are often run pretty efficiently and cleanly. Then they get bought, and the owners realise there’s not a lot of extra efficiency there, so they shut them down as they weren’t as profitable as they hoped.

You might get a chunk bought and then a chunk stripped out of that cohort. So that is all leading to a distilling down into fewer major events. The counter to that, though, is people still want to do events, and there’ll be a new crop of people coming through who love doing this stuff, who aren’t tired or exhausted, who haven’t built and developed complex events. The early indications point towards running communities that are popping up, effectively free-to-enter run clubs. They are linked to regions, running styles, and community interest groups, and you can go and find a run club to fit your requirements. They will put on social runs of fifty, a hundred or a couple hundred, getting up towards four or five hundred people for free. And they are part-funded by brands. So there’s a new group coming through who are social first event organisers who are learning the ropes around event delivery, because when you get up to 300, suddenly there’s another load of stuff you’ve got to work out. So I think there’s another crop of people coming through who will deliver good experiences.

There’s a limiting commercial model behind these that’s very much reliant on people’s volunteer time, but the good ones will develop into commercially viable communities. So, if I were going to say where I expected the industry to be in five years, I think you’ll have some significant consolidation, which I would be interested to see how that is managed and how participants respond to that. Do they see that as a good thing, or are they like, “Hold on, this doesn’t feel right. I don’t like big companies,” which we’ve seen elsewhere? But then for those people who don’t like big companies, there’s this emerging new style that is coming through. I think it’s going to be hard commercially for a lot of businesses in the way they did things beforehand. But I think there are opportunities for people who are either throwing a lot of money around or have deep pockets to potentially acquire stuff. And on the flip-side there are also opportunities for people who are just hungry, passionate, looking to get into this and who don’t have the baggage of doing it for 15 years. I’m excited to see where it goes.

Alexander Tanti: Absolutely, same here. Well, Nick, thank you so much for your time. This was a super insightful conversation. I really enjoyed it, and there are so many gems that I’m looking forward to sharing with our community of organisers.

Nick Tuppen: Likewise, thanks very much!

Connect with Nick via LinkedIn here

Connect with Threshold using the links below

Threshold Sports:

Instagram: @thresholdsports

LinkedIn: Threshold Sports

Threshold Trail Series:

Instagram: @thresholdtrailseries

Facebook: Threshold Trail Series

Endure24:

Instagram: @endure24uk

Facebook: Endure24

Ride Across Britain:

Instagram: @rideacrossbritain

Facebook: Ride Across Britain

A Conversation with Nick Tuppen — CEO of Threshold Sports was originally published in Racecheck on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Chris is the founder and race director of the Sheetz to Sheetz trail run, an annual event taking place in Virginia, USA, which sells out in less than 24 hours. Sheetz to Sheetz is a Racecheck Gold Award recipient with a 4.9/5 rating, making it one of the highest-rated events on the platform. As race director, his four-point mission for Sheetz-to-Sheetz includes: (1) bring people of all abilities and backgrounds together; (2) encourage a fun break from competitive races; (3) give back to the community; and (4) promote King George County as a trail running destination. We thoroughly enjoyed this conversation, which I believe contains many gems for first-time organisers and industry veterans alike.

Alexander Tanti: Maybe we can start by telling me a little bit about your background. What did you do before starting to organize races? Are you working on this now full-time? Just some general information would be fantastic.

Chris Chalkley: Sure, I certainly don’t do this full-time. This is a part-time hobby for me. In real life, I work for the US Department of Defense as a project manager, so nothing to do with this at all. My day job is very different, with little room for creativity.

I started running late in life, probably at age 45 or so, and I really enjoyed it. Apart from the physical outlet, it also gives me a social outlet. We do group runs, and when you’re training for marathons, you’re always looking for different sorts of long runs. We have these two stores near us that are convenience stores called Sheetz. And we have two of them in the county. We actually have three, but there are two of them that are separated. They happen to be about 14 miles apart, and a trail goes from one to the other. And so one day, we were looking for what can we do differently for a long run. So I figure that we run from this Sheetz to that Sheetz, and then we’ll figure out how to return.

So we did that, and that was fun. It was a good distance and a secluded trail.

Then when you reach the end, you have a store where you can get refreshments etc..

So that caught on, and we did that a couple of times just in our run group, and then I said, well, why don’t we see if anybody else wants to join us? So that was six years ago, and that was the first year I advertised it on Facebook as a meetup and said, “Hey, anybody wants to come and do this?” and I think the store manager gave us free coffee or something like that. So it’s very low-key, and there were maybe 24–25 people who showed up. But the concept came, and it just looked unique. It looked like something that people would want to do. So I tried it again the next year. And this became a once-a-year sort of thing.

Long story short, it just kind of grew to the point where it’s now 350 people. I’ve got people coming from multiple states. I’m fortunate in that it sells out very quickly, in less than one day last year, and I got all sorts of sponsors and local government participation. So in just six years, it’s gone from an idea, from just something we did for fun into something real.

To me, it’s still very much a part-time job. But more so, it’s a passion and a creative outlet. I get to create all the social media content; I can come up with crazy things along the course signs and, aid stations, and so forth.

Alexander Tanti: I found it really interesting that you said that you found organizing this event as an outlet of creativity, which you don’t necessarily get in your day job. What aspect of organizing races is creative, and how do you know how to use that creativity?

Chris Chalkley: Several things. One is the graphic design elements that go with the race. I’ve always been interested in that. I don’t really have an outlet for that at work. But I do all my own social media and graphics work, and I just released a video highlight of my last race. So that’s all creative. Lets me use Photoshop all day and do that sort of thing. And just the creative energy that goes into defining and coming up with a vision for your race or your event and seeing that through, one thing I’ve tried to do in my race is to make it as unique as possible.

Which is a little risky in the sense that there’s a proven formula that works for races, right? You know, you start, you have a banana and water, and you have aid stations, you get to the end, you get a medal and another banana. That works. And that’s almost every race you ever do. And I’ve done dozens like that, and that’s fine, but I wanted to have something that was different from that. So, first of all, the biggest difference is, it’s non-competitive. It’s not even timed, and I encourage people to go out, take their time, have fun, enjoy the scenery, enjoy each other, and then, I throw things at you along the course to make you slow down, like fun distractions. I have a campsite at the halfway point where there are hammocks where you’re encouraged to take a break and enjoy the campfire. So just coming up with Ideas like that.

Basically, what crazy things can we do that no other race does? That’s another avenue for creativity.

Chris uses race organizing as a creative outlet. Part of the event’s success and longevity is due to incorporating and leveraging his passion for creative work within the race organization. What are your talents and passions? Finding a way to incorporate those into your events will give you a better chance of staying consistent in the long run and finding deep joy in putting up events.

Alexander Tanti: You mentioned having a vision for the race; where did that vision come from? Was it from you participating in races and visualizing the ideal event for you? Somebody might do something for the sake of differentiating, but if they’re not true to that, then it just won’t come out genuine, and people just won’t reciprocate in that sense. What do you think?

Chris Chalkley: I think the first thing that you have to do is just define your mission. What’s going to drive you? What are you gonna stay consistent with as you try all these different things? You know, the fixed denominator regardless of how unique you want the race to be.

So, for example, I said a few things early on. I said I want this to be about community. And that dictates some decisions that you make over the years, such as the size of the race. I keep it small, and the focus is on helping the community. So even things like buying local, instead of buying online. I want to give back, so I set aside a certain portion of the profits to go back to the community, in terms of charity and donations. That is an example of how the fixed denominator for what your mission is, in my case community, drives creativity around everything else.

It’s setting some long-term goals upfront. Being non-competitive, I want it to be more about having fun and community. And then, over the years, you come up with many ideas that may not all work. You know, you try some of them. Some of them never make it. But I’m just adding ideas all day long, all year long.

Then I refer back to the list and say, well could this work, how could it work, and if it’s too much of a distraction or looks too much like I’m doing something just for the sake of being different, then it gets dropped. It has to still fit your race mission and your goals.

Having a core mission defines everything, from how you market the event, your website copy and imagery, all the way to what changes you make every year. Your core mission acts as a compass, helping you avoid distractions and only introducing aspects that align with this mission.

Alexander Tanti: So, you have some basic values that act as your compass. How many years are you running this race now?

Chris Chalkley: This is my sixth year. I just finished the 6th edition in March (‘23)

Alexander Tanti: And am I right to assume that every year, you just introduce a different aspect or you try to improve the event year by year? How do you go about understanding or deciding on what that new feature is? Do you do that via surveys? Do you speak to your customers? At the finish line? How do you decide on, let’s say, these are the ideas of what I’d like to introduce and then all the way to deciding and then implementing that?

Chris Chalkley: It probably starts straight after the race. I send out a survey to all the runners, and the most important part of the survey is the final section. I try to get them to brainstorm and ask what they would like to see the following year. I get a lot of good ideas there.

Then a lot of times I come up with ideas and then run them by my ambassadors and staff. I do just about everything myself, such as the advertising, the graphics, the planning, and even building things for the site and building the race course. But I do have, and I started this, maybe three years ago, a small group of ambassadors. So I’ll put out a call every year and say, “Hey, I’m looking to introduce something different this year, such as this and that.”

And the main thing they do, they’re my listening board, really. I can throw out ideas and say, Hey, what do you think about this? Or I’ll make a graphic, or I’ll make an advertisement or social media campaign. I’ll run it by them first and always get their input. So, that’s been very helpful when it’s a race where you’re the main person doing everything. You need another group to run things by.

Create a small “board of directors” comprised of race ambassadors. Incentivise a few core runners of your events with a free entry to bounce ideas off them. They will help you stay true to your values and allow you to keep a close pulse on your customers.

Alexander Tanti: How do you incentivize those people to join your ambassador groups? Are they just happy to do it for free?

Chris Chalkley: Yeah, they might just be happy to do it for free, but I also offer a free entry and might also give them a little bit of swag, you know, shirts and stickers, that sort of thing.

Alexander Tanti: So you have created this little personal board of directors in a way that helps you with your decision-making process. How often do you meet? Is it like a monthly call?

Chris Chalkley: It’s nothing that formal. In fact I think we only met once online, and that was the kick-off meeting. First, I introduce the Race, its mission and its history. “These are ideals we are going for, and I’m gonna be pitching ideas to you, and I’d really appreciate your feedback”. So there is usually an educational kick-off meeting, and after that, it’s usually through a Facebook group where I’ll just post something and say, “What do you think about this?”. Or, “Here’s the schedule, am I forgetting anything?”

T hey’re my eyes and ears out there. They have their own race groups/clubs across the region, and I ask them to get the word out. But also to be listening. What are people saying? What are people excited about the event? Are they worried about something? So, it’s, it’s very useful to get feedback and also to share information.

Alexander Tanti: You mentioned it’s a 350-person event, right? Do you employ full-time staff? Obviously, you have help on the day, but you said you mostly do everything regarding the website and taking entries and promotions. At which point do you think a one-man operation is no longer feasible and you can no longer handle the workload as one person? Do you think that comes after 500 entries? 600? I’m just interested in understanding to what extent is it possible to run an event by yourself and where is that saturation point.

Chris Chalkley: Well, it is a very small race, and I’m at the limit, actually. And there are reasons for that. First, there’s the physical limitation of how many people we can fit into the narrow trail, and even with waves, I found that 350 is probably about the max number.

We’re also limited by the number of people we can have in the store because we usually gather everyone before and after the race. It’s always cold, and everybody huddles in the store, so you can imagine 300-plus people in a small convenience store. We just completely take over the place. And so, there are only so many people we can do that with. So I’m now at the point where this is the first year I’ve hit that 350 mark. If you’re asking about the saturation point, I think this is probably about it.

You know, if I went beyond that, I would probably need more help. I get by with a lot of volunteers. I do have an assistant. I incentivize that with a small stipend; it’s still very much a part-time thing. The difference between that role and the ambassadors is that this person does administrative work, manages RunSignup (reg platform), and organises the volunteers.

Not a very large job, but it’s just one more thing I can delegate, such as the volunteer emails or something like that.

Alexander Tanti: How do you go about finding volunteers? Because I’m guessing that’s probably a big pain point for many organizers.

Chris Chalkley: It is, in fact, the largest pain point in the last couple of years. I think early on, building out the vision and working out the logistics of race day it’s about finding the right vendors and suppliers. I think I’ve got that worked out now. I’ve got people I know and trust. But volunteers come and go. And you got to find the right ones, you’ve got to train them. And again, if you have this thing where your race is a little bit different from most, even if you have experienced volunteers that have done many other races, I still have to train them on how our aid stations work and how they’re different from your average event.

This year, for instance, we switched to cupless racing, which was a huge transition but also involved a lot of training. I ended up making training videos to say, “All right, this is an important change. And it comes with some risk of bottlenecks. And here’s how we’re going to handle it..”

Training has become an important part of it, but just finding the right volunteers, you know, takes years of building relationships. In this past year, more and more, I’m relying upon my day job coworkers because I know these people already, and I can trust them. My boss helped out this year and had a very prominent role, which was great.

Leverage your own social and professional circle for backup help in case your volunteers don’t show up. Take the time to train your volunteers by creating explanatory videos which you can share.

Alexander Tanti: Awesome.

Chris Chalkley: And then when one of your key volunteers is not available, you have a backup.

Alexander Tanti: So you leverage your entire social and professional social circle for help.

Chris Chalkley: There still is a lot of risk. I’ve got about 50 volunteers, and it’s still going to be people that you’ve never even met before, and they sign up. It’s a little nerve-wracking. But as long as you have people you trust in the key positions, that makes it much easier.

Alexander Tanti: That’s a great segway to discussing a little bit about risk because even though event organisation is not a full-time occupation, it still has to be treated as a business, with all its risks and contingency planning. As you mentioned, many things could go wrong by introducing a new feature, such as the cupless aid stations. You had to explain to people how to deal with these situations. Do you have a list of contingencies of things that may potentially go wrong, and do you educate your volunteers on that, or have it a “manual” to refer to if something goes wrong? I guess in really stressful situations, you have zero time to think. How do you deal with risk when it comes to race day?

Chris Chalkley: It’s difficult to think of everything that can go wrong. As the race has matured, I have taken more action on emergency planning and so forth. The first few years, honestly, I was winging it like most people do for a very small race. But then it gets a little bit larger and, you know, starts attracting people from the region.

And got more engagement and interest from the local government. As I work with several local government departments, I’ve needed to spend more time on risk. The 2022 race brought this home. We had absolutely horrible weather. I mean, the worst weather you can possibly imagine on race day.

And the idea of moving the race at the last minute, I didn’t have that planned out exactly. And I was going by the most accurate weather forecast I could find. All of the forecasts were consistent in saying that you can start the race — it might be rainy and a little windy, but the worst of it will come in the afternoon. So I’m going by that. And then the front came through literally 30 minutes before the race started. The portaloos blew over, and all my race structures were blown away. We had to rip that down as fast as we could. So it was a nightmare, but looking back at it, I was very proud of how my staff and volunteers all came together, and we just knew what to do.

We said, all right, take this down, take that down, we’re not doing this, we’re not doing that, and everybody just came together and made it happen. Now after that, I learned that we really need more of a deliberate weather plan or emergency plan documented.

But like I said, you can’t think of everything. This past year, the traffic control team, a group I hired for the first time, didn’t show up. So it was very stressful. But again, we came together. The guy coordinating the traffic control, who happens to be my boss, just stepped up and said, “All right, here’s what we’re gonna do, we call out for volunteers to help”. Every able-bodied volunteer helped at the start line. We also worked with the local law enforcement, who helped us by blocking traffic as best they could. So, in the end, it all worked out; it was great. I couldn’t have planned for that, but you have to account for risk and take that into your planning.

While it’s impossible to think of everything that could go wrong, it’s important to have contingency plans in place for the usual suspects such as foul weather, marshalls or volunteers not showing up.

Alexander Tanti: Do you have any other war stories to share?

Chris Chalkley: A couple of things. So this year, I ran my own race for the first time in several years. When this started, it was just a fun run, and I said, Hey, who wants to join me on this? So, You know, I actually did the race for the first two or three years, but then it quickly got to the point where there’s no way I could continue doing that. You can imagine on race day; the race director has so much to do. So there were several years when of course, I couldn’t run it. That made me uncomfortable because I couldn’t see what was happening on the course. I couldn’t see how these aid stations were actually operating. And I didn’t always have pictures and photographs to look at later. So I was determined this year to actually run my own race.

I spoke to a friend of mine who’s a race director, and he agreed to fill in for me while I was on the race course. So literally, at the last minute, I made the announcement. “Hey, I’m gonna join you guys today and hand it over to my guest race director”. So I did that, and I jumped right into the start line, and I ran the race myself. The problem was I was not prepared to run my own race. I’ve run that course many times. It’s 14 miles. But you can imagine the stress of race week; I was going on almost zero sleep, and no food because that morning, the wind was howling at about 4 am, and that kept me up. I was panicking about my tents and everything blowing down. So I just ran out the door to the start line to ensure everything was tied down.

And then I just jumped into the start line as if it was no big deal. I was fine until about mile 12, and then it all started to hit me. And I got very, very dizzy. The last two miles were just a blur as I walked and stumbled to the finish line. One of my good friends caught up to me at mile 13 and could tell I was struggling and offered me some food that she gathered along the course. So, lesson learned there, I finished. And after a half hour of coffee and doughnuts at the end, I recovered, but the last mile, I was trying not to pass out.

Don’t participate in your own race unless you’re actually prepared and rested :)

Alexander Tanti: Are you looking to grow the race, or are you just happy as it is? I know you said It’s probably reached maximum capacity, but would you ever consider doing another one somewhere else or the same one, maybe at a different time of the year?

Chris Chalkley: Not for the near term. Maybe when I retire. I’m a few years from retirement, so you know, that might be a possibility to have another event or to help somebody else. Right now, it’s all I can take as a part-time job. My wife would kill me if I made it even larger because even though I say it’s a part-time job, I mean it’s 40 hours a week, for many weeks of the year. Even in the offseason, when I should be doing nothing, I’m still doing 20 hours a week on the race.

So I mean it’s very time intensive. I think it’s misleading to think it’s just a one-time event once a year, but it’s really a year-round occupation. So being part-time, that’s really about the extent that I can take.

Know your limits and how much work you can take on. Don’t compromise the quality of your event if adding more events would mean you get overstretched.

Alexander Tanti: So for people looking to put up a race thinking that even if it’s a small one, they can probably pull it off with just a few hours a week, it’s a bit of an illusion.

Chris Chalkley: Well, It depends. If you’re doing a typical standard race using the proven formula, it’s not as demanding. I’m trying to make it a bit more personal and have been accused of being a perfectionist in the past, so I could see that coming across in my race as well.

Alexander Tanti: Your race has won a Racecheck Gold Award, so this underscores the effort you’re putting in. It’s not easy to get one of those.

Chris Chalkley: I know people who are doing this full-time and people who are doing it part-time. And I think when you’re starting out, you underestimate things like building relationships with and finding sponsors. Coordinating volunteers. So unless you have key people doing those things, it can be overwhelming.

Alexander Tanti: Would you ever consider going full-time? If it’s something you enjoy so much, what’s holding you back from going full-time?

Chris Chalkley: There are several reasons, but the biggest ones are the time commitment and stress. I don’t want to scare anybody off, but it is incredibly stressful to do any event organization. There’s so much at stake on that one day, and everything going well.

So it’s not something I’d ever consider. It’s just more of a hobby for me. I know people that do it for a living, and it just takes everything they have; it consumes their life. I can’t imagine doing multiple events yearly because I put so much into one event. So for me, that’s not really an option. That’s something I considered. As I retire, I do like to give back and mentor other race directors or event directors; that might be something I’d like to do.

Alexander Tanti: And if there’s one thing you could advise somebody looking to start organizing races, what would that be?

Chris Chalkley: The one thing would be to encourage them to set aside enough time to do it properly. Things you think won’t take so much time end up taking ten times as long. When it comes to sponsors, volunteers or anything where you’re coordinating a bunch of people, you’re at the mercy of their schedules, and dependent upon them getting back to you. And it just takes a lot of time, meetings, and running all over the county spending time with people.

Sometimes, you have to coordinate with local governments and organizations. So you think, well I just have to do this and get a few volunteers and some food, but you don’t realize all the other things you must do. Permits, working with local law enforcement and so forth. There’s just a lot to it. So, it’s not something you can’t overcome, but you need somebody to help you. If you find someone or a great resource that can help you to get started and save you all that effort. For example, resources such as this interview series. Or for me, it was the Race Directors HQ which was a great resource for me. I was reading everything I could, trying to absorb everything and save myself some time. When I was ready, I completed a race director certification program through the Road Runners Club of America. That brought it all together. So educate yourself because it will be a lot more than you think.

Alexander Tanti: That suggests that there are certain character traits that a race director should have, like great attention to detail..

Chris Chalkley: Absolutely. Yeah. You have to be a detail-oriented person. And have the self-awareness to realize that if you’re not, perhaps, you can still do this, but you need to surround yourself with people who are that way. So, if that’s not your personality or character trait, then you can still define the vision, and you can still run the whole race. Still, you better hire or find a volunteer that can do the day-to-day planning because there are a million details that have to be tracked and if you’re not good at that, then your race is going to fail.

Be aware of your own strengths and weaknesses. If your attention to detail is poor, find someone on your team to care for the nitty-gritty stuff. Leverage the strengths of your staff to support any of your own weaknesses.

Alexander Tanti: Thanks so much, Chris — this has been incredibly insightful, and really appreciate your time.

Chris Chalkley: Thanks a lot!

Originally published at https://racecheck.substack.com.

A conversation with Chris Chalkley - Founder of Sheetz to Sheetz Trail Run was originally published in Racecheck on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Dan Brice has over 20 years of working experience in outdoor and adventurous activities, guiding mountain biking, kayaking, and canoeing. His mission is to showcase and share the beautiful landscapes of North Devon and Somerset with the world and do it in a sustainable, respectful and mutually beneficial way for the surrounding communities. The long-term and thoughtful approach to building relationships with stakeholders and ensuring that the entire community benefits from the events are key to longevity in the industry. There are a number of gems of insight and knowledge that every event organiser, large or small, can benefit from and apply immediately.

Alexander Tanti: I’d love to hear the background about how you started organizing races.

Dan Brice: I spent my whole professional life working in the outdoor and adventurous activities sector. I’ve worked in private, state and higher education, lecturing and teaching on outdoor education programmes. I have been involved with local canoe clubs, mountain bike clubs, and running clubs, and I have always been an active person but more of a mountain biker as well as a whitewater kayaker. At times I also dabbled in some walking and climbing. I’m really passionate about the Quantock Hills in Somerset, which is our local area of outstanding natural beauty and quite the mecca for mountain biking; spending most of my life mountain biking there.

In 2010 I decided I wanted to put on an event at the Quantock Hills because there were none! I did it voluntarily with a mate just to get an event on and, at the same time, give something back to the mountain biking community.

In 2013, we put on the first event. And this year will be the 10th edition of that event, having missed 2020 due to COVID-19, and that was the stepping stone, really. I ran that for three years before starting to work for the Channel Group, an outdoor activity provider, as their operations manager. I asked if I could bring this event with me and do it as part of my job, and they agreed. They had just taken on another event, a long-distance walking event called the Exmoor Perambulation. So as soon as I started, it was like, “Well, Dan, you’ve organised an event in the past, so you can deliver this one as well!”. And so I then had two events as part of my portfolio as an operations manager.

It just kind of exploded from there. Within three years, we had six events having taken on the Exmoor Explorer mountain bike event. Then we were asked to do the Mendip Murmuration mountain bike event as part of the National Trust Top of the Gorge Outdoor Festival. We were also given the Minehead triathlon by the Somerset County sports partnership. We’re based in Minehead in Somerset as a business, and we love the sea, so we took that from a pool swim to a sea swim and made the run a bit more entertaining. So here we are now in 2023, and I’ve got Channel UK Events CIC, which is a not-for-profit social enterprise incorporated in 2018.

We’ve got 15 events, although they’re all quite small. They’re all about exposing the amazing landscapes that we have in Somerset and North Devon. And that’s my passion, getting more people regularly outdoors and active in these beautiful places. Sorry for the long answer!

A vision for your events does not have to be overly complex nor grandiose. Dan’s passion is about exposing North Devon and Somerset’s beautiful landscapes to people in a sustainable and respectful way. This is his North Star and what drives every decision behind the organisation of events.

Alexander Tanti: I love it, don’t worry! So since 2010, when you had the initial idea about putting on that initial mountain biking event, it took three years until you actually put it on.

Dan Brice: Yeah. If I’m brutally honest, there are different event organizers who do things differently, but I’m passionate about putting events in the right places for the right reasons. There are amazing places where we runners and bikers would love to see events hosted, but this needs to be done in the right way. Landowners must know it’s going on. Authorities must know what’s going on. Natural England are involved to help us respect the landscape. So we utilize the trails that we are allowed and do it in a way that we’ve got conservation and sustainability in mind. Rightly or wrongly, there are some event organizers that will go, “ Right, I’m gonna hire an HQ venue, I’m gonna go markup this route, then start selling tickets “, and that’s as much as they do.

We go completely the other way, and actually, that costs us more because when you start asking for permissions from all these different stakeholders, everybody wants a slice of the pie. But we’re prepared to do that because we are a not-for-profit social enterprise, invested in getting more people outdoors and active, but at the same time, trying to educate those communities in responsible and sustainable use of the countryside.

I come from a background of playing cricket, rugby, and hockey. You have a groundsman that comes along and cuts the grass, sorts the ground and tidies up after you. Out on the trails, you don’t have that, you know. So our impact is massive, and if we use it badly, we’re a really bad advert for mountain biking and trail running. Because the local communities will go, “ You’ve just thrown 300 people down that trail, and now look at the state of it “.

And then, although we know that over the years, there’s been cumulative damage by lots of people, we naturally become the easy target. So getting people on our side is what I’m passionate about. I’ve got good relationships with our national parks, with the AONB services, with the National Trust and Natural England. Those relationships mean building trust with those people, and then it’s actually much easier and quicker to put a new event on. In the past, I took three years to develop those contacts and develop those relationships, but this effort and dedication to building trust first is now paying massive dividends.

Getting all stakeholders on your side is key for longevity in this industry. Building relationships and showing respect and genuine understanding of the needs of landowners, councils, local government bodies, business owners etc pays huge dividends in the long run.

Alexander Tanti: That’s very interesting. So what you’re saying is that there are many different counterparts involved in putting on these events that, initially, it takes time to develop these relationships. Still, once trust is established, then you accelerate that process for future events. Have you ever thought about putting on events in a completely new area, or do you think that sticking to a particular area would be an advantage for new or even existing organizers looking to grow their events?

Dan Brice: Yes, that’s the reason I don’t look much further afield than Somerset and North Devon. Not only are we trying to educate people about better and safer use of the landscape and provide amazing experiences for our communities, but we’re also about investing in the local economy, and one of our big goals at the moment is to be as green as possible. So if I decide I’m going to go and put an event on in the late district or in the South Downs, how many times have I got to drive there to go meet people and meet the landowners?

The carbon footprint of just me driving backwards and forwards, as well as the expense of rising fuel costs, would just make that event a much bigger thing for me to put on. Plus, I think there are enough organizers in those other locations. So why do I need to go and put something on where there are already some amazing people doing amazing things? I can showcase what we have exactly where we are. I can do it with a much smaller carbon footprint. And one of the things we’re all about is using reusable signage and route marking, being single-use, plastic-free, and minimizing travel.

We get involved with the National Trust and Exmoor National Park to plant trees in the right places for the right reasons. We also use local suppliers; our medals are wooden and made locally, for example. Even all of the cakes for our tea stops are made by local suppliers. You know, so I’m not going to a major supermarket chain and buying a mass of flapjack for next to nothing or shipping my medals in from China. Not saying they’re not quality products. But again, the footprint of that coming halfway around the world is massive, you know? That’s what we’re about. We know that’s not for everybody, but hopefully, our clients buy into the fact that we’re about investing in our community in all aspects of our events.

Alexander Tanti: Yeah. It sounds like you have a passion for showcasing that beautiful area. Is that something you always dreamed about? Being active in those places and one day sharing those same trails with more people?

Dan Brice: Yeah, I think that passion probably comes from being an athlete first and not a race organizer, and I think now I want to give back to that extent. I’ve spent 20 years working in outdoor and adventurous activities, guiding mountain biking, kayaking, and canoeing in the area where I live, so you become hugely passionate about those places. People come to you, and they want to learn and explore; these events are just another medium to do that on a mass participation scale. It’s a community that can already run or ride, but they want to come along and do something in a more social capacity with a route that’s marked for them rather than eight people being on a guided day out; this is 250 people being guided by the route markers.

For smaller events of up to 300 people, it pays off to think of it as a guiding event, but rather than a physical guide, using route markers to guide the group. Thinking of it this way emphasizes the level of detail required in marking the route in a way that creates an intimate experience within a larger group.

Alexander Tanti: So, just taking it back from 2010 to 2013 when you were in the process of building these relationships and working towards that goal of putting up that first event. I’m guessing you had to sustain yourself somehow. What were you doing at that time?

Dan Brice: So, for that first event, I did that all voluntarily with a friend of mine, but I was working full-time. I’d just been back a year from travelling, and I was working for our local county sports partnership. I was working in schools, training and developing teachers to deliver outdoor education activities and then working with local canoe clubs, rowing clubs, and running clubs to help with their club development. So my bread and butter was still in the outdoor sector but more with schools and clubs. I was doing this as something to put back into the community.

And luckily for me, it’s now developed into a place now where we have a small social enterprise. I work three days a week for Channel UK Events CIC, and I’ve got Jan, who covers the admin and marketing for me for 10 hours a week. To put 15 events a year on with two part-time staff requires a massive amount of passion.

Alexander Tanti: That’s incredible. But I guess you must have come up with some sort of systemized process by which you approach these events.

Dan Brice: Yeah, it’s a lot of events to organize, and most of our events are small. The biggest event we do is probably 350 people. So, they’re all about being very intimate. It’s about me being on the finish line of every event; everybody knows who I am. I’m welcoming people from start to finish. That’s what I’m passionate about. But I do systemize the approach to a degree. We’ve recently moved to Eventrac as a booking system, which makes things a lot easier for us, as the booking system has built-in email marketing, charity giving and an online e-commerce system for selling merchandise. Working with Racecheck to allow our clients to review our events is also proving really useful and should further improve our efficiency.

Then most of the routes for our running and triathlon events are already set. Once the route is set and you know who the landowners are, it’s quite straightforward to get the permissions in place for those. The longer these events happen, the easier it gets, so longevity helps us to further systemize the process for the following year.

Our mountain bike events, on the other hand, are very different because they’re not on the same route every year. They’re explorative like an off-road sportive, and the idea is every year is a slightly different route, so that means I’ve got to find out who the landowner is in the different sections. This part is hard to systemize.

Having the right partners in place and having built strong relationships with all local stakeholders allows you to systemise the process of putting on many events with only a handful of staff. While mass participation is traditionally considered a non-scalable business, this is one example where one unit of effort corresponds to a scalable outcome.

Alexander Tanti: How do you approach competition in your local area? Surely there are other events being put on apart from yours.

Dan Brice: One of the things I’m really passionate about is not seeing all of our other local event organizers as competition. I think if we can work together to make sure our dates don’t clash and do a bit of cross-promotion, then we’re growing the pond, so to speak. We’re providing more opportunities for our communities.

I work very closely with a few other local race organizers, and we bounce ideas off each other. For example, I’m meeting with Dave from Albion Running next week, who organizes many ultras in this area, which we don’t do. We’re meeting to bounce ideas off each other and discuss how we can cross-promote. I also meet regularly with Tom from Relish Running and Ceri from Wild Running.

Think of competitors as partners and an opportunity to cross-promote each other. Engage in frequent, thoughtful and constructive discussions to ensure everyone gains.

Alexander Tanti: Any learnings that quickly taught you to do things differently and experiences that are quite memorable?

Dan Brice: No out-and-out horror stories as such. The weather plays its part sometimes. But that’s something you struggle to plan for. The night before, you may have to send out emails to everybody saying, “ Please can you park somewhere different because the fields are underwater “, etc. But I’ve always tried to do things the right way and have the proper permissions and relationships with local authorities and landowners in place; it goes a long way to not having some of those horror stories. I’ve heard a few race directors that will use public rights of way without proper permission in place, which naturally creates a lot of friction with the landowners and, in turn, causes confrontations between entrants and clients; this is something I hope never happens at one of my events.

Telling the right people that we’re doing what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and the passion for it and investing back in the communities is hugely important. The National Trust will charge a small license fee to use their land; Forestry England will do the same. While there are fees involved, we’re getting the backing of those people for future events and remain insured because they know it’s happening.

Alexander Tanti: From the sounds of it, a key part of your success is your willingness to invest as much time as required in building these relationships with the right people. In your experience, have you found what is the right messaging to use to these landowners to try and get them invested in the event?

Dan Brice: I think it’s just working with them and genuinely trying to understand their concerns; if, after proposing a route to them, they say no, they may have very justifiable reasons why they don’t want 300 runners or bikers coming through that area at that particular time of the year. And it shows understanding and willingness to work with them. It might be the end of June, and we’ve got bird ground nesting season, so that particular route would disturb the bird life. It’s about being flexible.

Some other race organizers out there might say, “ This is the route I want to use and that is what I’m going to do. it’s a public right of way, I can do what I like”. This is simply not conducive behaviour for staying in the area and running the events long term.

Alexander Tanti: You basically approach the local community as being part of your team.

Dan Brice: Yes, absolutely. For example, we have a series of 5k and 10k night trail running events through the winter, but we work alongside the National Trust to deliver those. So we run them out of National Trust properties where they’ve got a car park and a cafe. They’re accommodating because we bring a number of people to this venue in the middle of winter when you wouldn’t normally expect that many people. Suddenly your cafe has seen a big uplift in income because everyone’s coming and bought a coffee with a bit of cake, paid for parking etc. These things make a difference.

Another example is a special event we’ve got coming on next year, which is working with a steam railway. We’re going to charter the train, and the event starts and finishes at their stations where they’ve got cafes and car parks and toilets. We get to put on a really unique and amazing event while the business owners get to increase their income on that day. Having 400 runners coming through the cafes alongside that railway is fantastic.

Then, there’s a charity that has been set up to create a walking and cycling path between the stations. They’re currently bidding to buy land to create these paths. Through this event, we can actually promote and increase awareness about that charity and what they’re trying to achieve. So it’s all about trying to invest in the community and community projects and bringing them alongside our event.

At every step of the way, think about how the local community and businesses can benefit from your event. This is key to building trust and goodwill and ensuring longevity for your business.

Alexander Tanti: Overall, what would you say is your percentage of repeat participants?

Dan Brice: I’d say that repeat business is high, probably 40 to 50%.

Alexander Tanti: And why do you think that is? Why do people keep coming back?

Dan Brice: If I’m honest with you, just listening to feedback and learning from the reviews. I think having a very welcoming approach is key, but it’s much easier to do for events of our scale versus, say, a road marathon for two and a half thousand people. I just wouldn’t be able to have that same approach. We have people turning up and asking where Jan and I are. We might not know who those people are, but they know who we are because we’re the ones on the start line, in the registration tent, on the finish line, signing off every email and posting on social media; I think that’s a big part of it. I think people also know that we’re not so much about racing at Channel Events; we’re about inclusion and getting people out there. Of course, we know people are going to come along and race and try to go as fast as they can. But actually, for me, the person who comes across the line last has achieved the most because, for them, it’s probably been the hardest challenge. We’re right there till the end, and they get the biggest cheer.

So, just little things like that bring people back. We’re not a running company or a biking company, or a triathlon company. We do a bit of everything, which makes my life harder if I’m honest, but what we are seeing is people that used to come mountain biking with us are now coming to have a go at trail running or having a go at a triathlon because they know us, they trust us and believe in what we do and know that we’re a safe place for them to come and experience new and/or different activities.

It’s great to see some of those same faces turning up every year and then turning up to a different event.

Alexander Tanti: How do you find volunteers?

Dan Brice: I’ve probably got about a hundred and fifty people on my database. We decided to call our volunteers the ‘ tribe ‘, creating their own community. We issue them bright, orange T-shirts that say ‘tribe member’ on the back of them that double as high vis. We’re not expecting people to wear a high-vis vest that nobody really likes wearing, but when they’ve got these technical bright orange T-shirts, they can use them outside of our event to share their love of the ‘tribe’. We also ensure that if it’s a long day, they get breakfast and a brew to set them up for the day. If it’s an evening event, they get a brew and a bit of cake. We do offer free entries to volunteers, but it’s interesting that not every volunteer is in it because they want a free race. They’re in it because it’s actually a good excuse for them to come and get some fresh air, socially interact with other people, and cheer people on. Having a team of volunteers that engage with your clients is really important for me.

Volunteers do not always sign up because of perks. Many times people just want to spend time outdoors and break their routine. Rather than making perks the central value proposition to volunteers, make sure also to highlight all the other subjective benefits that they would get by spending 6 hours helping out.

Alexander Tanti: It’s really interesting that even volunteers have a specific skill set to help elevate participants’ experience on event day.

One question I have is, if there was one piece of advice that you would give to an organizer who’s just starting out, what would that be? What do you think makes for a successful race organizer? And somebody who can achieve longevity in this industry.

Dan Brice: My advice would be don’t rush into your first event. Give it time, even if it means taking you two or three years to do it. Getting in touch with landowners, booking venues, and getting the route right pays dividends down the road.

It’s more important to wait until all stakeholders are on your side and the right relationships are in place before putting on your first event. Even if that means postponing for 2–3 years. Give it time, this is key for success.

Alexander Tanti: So don’t compromise on your vision for the sake of speed.

Dan Brice: Yeah, I think if you rush into something and the route is not great, or you upset one of the landowners, then you’ve got to change the route for that event next year. Take the time to think about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. If you’re doing it for a quick buck, then go nuts, but if you’re doing it for longevity, then you need to invest in your community. Not just your participant community but your local community as well.

Of course, there is the element of growth; we need to grow and need financially sustainable events. Given the tough market for events post-covid, combined with the current cost of living crisis, the next five to ten years will be all about sustaining the organization. Numbers to a lot of our events are capped. For example, our mountain bike events are capped at 250 or 300 by the local authorities to minimize erosion. As such, we need to make sure that we sell out our events to those capped numbers. That will ensure that Channel Events are still here in five years’ time, and Jan and I still have our part-time employment. And that we still have the opportunity to offer great experiences to our community.

There’s always a temptation to add more events and try different concepts, but doing it in a sustainable fashion, leading with your head and not your heart, is important for longevity.

Alexander Tanti: Thank you so much for your time. This has been incredibly insightful!

Originally published at https://racecheck.substack.com.

A conversation with Dan Brice - Director at Channel UK Events CIC was originally published in Racecheck on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

An incredibly insightful conversation with a race director who’s done and seen it all. From 2-person operations to managing teams of over 200 people, single-day events, and multi-day events, from hosting just a handful of people all the way to marathons with 10s of thousands of participants. Mark Turner is the founder and director of UtraSwim 33.3, which is swim’s answer to multi-day off-road ultra running events. In this conversation, he is sharing how he’s managed to consistently deliver successful and sustainable events for decades, using emotion as his secret weapon. Mark’s passion for creating unforgettable experiences for his participants was so inspiring that I signed up for the next edition of UltraSwim 33.3 immediately. This should not be missed by any event organiser or professional in mass participation sports.

Alexander Tanti: Mark, fantastic to have you as part of the series. I’d love to hear about your background and how you came about starting to organise races.

Mark Turner: On the events side, I started in the early 2000s. Before that, I was actually managing athletes with a young sailor called Ellen MacArthur, who became a quite famous single-handed sailor. We were partners and managed her sailing career, and ran some sailing projects that eventually also introduced us to the topic of raising money for managing events. And then after, I guess six, seven years, we moved from just doing athletes to starting creating events or taking over existing events that were in trouble.

The first instance, actually, was a historic sailing race across the Atlantic Ocean that was about to disappear, which we renamed The Transat. We picked that up, as has happened a few times in my sports business career, for a dollar or a single euro, but with huge risk, as it was just a few months before it was meant to take place, with very little in place. It happens a lot, unfortunately, especially with events managed by volunteers that grow fantastically, get bigger and bigger, then start depending on sponsorship and then the sponsor pulls out. And the structure behind it is unable to absorb the shock. And in this case, in 2004, we picked up a transatlantic race from the UK to the US.

That got us going from just managing athletes and projects into managing events. We started creating other sailing events worldwide, and I think by the time I stopped working on it, we were in 23 countries. It was 2010 when Ellen MacArthur and I went different ways. She went up to start a project called the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, which is in a whole different sphere and stopped sailing herself. I bought her out of our company, OC Sport, and gave that half of the company to a young guy called Remi Duchemin. He was a young and up-and-coming star at ASO (Amaury Sport Organisation — Tour de France, Dakar Rally etc.) but left ASO to join me. And with him came a huge amount of input in the outdoor event space. That took us quite quickly into owning the Geneva Marathon. It was a similar case where the marathon had got bigger and bigger, and then the title sponsor pulled out just four months before, and we stepped in and bought it for one franc. We managed to pull it off, and that got us our first outdoor event which is now a very successful Marathon Festival, with 20–25,000 people or something this year, if I”m not mistaken.

So that happened quite often along the way, and then we quickly also started developing cycling. We created the Haute Route, which is a multi-day cycling race in the Alps initially, that was recently actually sold to Ironman. Developing the Haute Route was a crazy experience. I mean, super crazy. There aren’t many events today in any sport that follow that format and for a good reason. They’re twice as complicated, not just because they take place over however many days, but because everything’s more complex. But this really appeals to me as a format because of the emotion that gets created. Everybody in the family gets involved, people suffer but also enjoy themselves, they get challenged but also get rewarded, and that just builds into an overall incredible experience. One-day events also offer an element of that but not to the same extent because you don’t get the same bonds created between participants as in the multi-day experience, which is tough sporting, life and organization-wise.

Alexander Tanti: And is it true that you actually competed among your participants in some of those early Haute Route events?

Mark Turner: That’s true! In the initial days of those events, I was actually out there riding them as well. Being part of the organization, I knew that you need to be on the inside of the pain and suffering to really understand the competitors’ needs or priorities.

I’ve always tried to keep that mentality in different events I have been involved in, as I genuinely believe you need someone in the senior team of the organization actually competing and doing it. Often, what you think is important as an organizer, viewing it from the side of the car or the finish line, is completely different to what’s in the head of the competitor who’s on a bike or in the water. Understanding what goes through their head in that exhausted state. Their priorities are often very, very different to what you think they are.

The first briefings I actually wrote right after getting off the bike to present to 300 riders an hour later. I was still in lycra when on stage, explaining the route and what to look out for.

Alexander Tanti: Interestingly, in one of the interviews a few weeks ago, one of the pieces of advice that I got from the organizer was to never do your own race unless you’re really prepared and rested. Especially in the run-up to the event, you’re probably exhausted by so many elements, and the morning of the event, you’re supposedly up very, very early in the morning. How were you able to actually ride the event? Knowing the Haute Route, it’s not like a 5K, 30-minute race. It’s one of the most brutal events out there!. You know,…

Mark Turner: I had a great team, and I was not part of the dedicated operations group on the ground. But nonetheless, in the beginning, everything was fairly raw. We didn’t have that much experience, especially in this format. The bit that we wanted to make a difference in, which most events need to make a difference in, is how close to your competitors you are and how well you understand what’s really important for them. Multi-day events are very different because of the added logistical details like the timing of getting your bag to the hotel, serving food, limited recovery time etc.

And because you’re in a multi-day event, you’ve got to factor in the intervals between races and the recovery. With UltraSwim, it’s a bit different, as you have a bit more time between stages. But with cycling events, the last person would come in after riding for 10 hours. They need to get off the bike, get sorted, get some food, get to the hotel, get some kind of recovery, and get to bed. The next day, get up again at five or six to do it all over again. So super compressed for time. Every tiny detail becomes important, even waiting for your bag 10 minutes longer than you wanted to could become a major stress factor. So that’s why being on the inside was good. Even down to what you eat, and the food stops. It’s easy to have a plan about what you think people want. But actually, if you got someone in the organization participating, then, you know that there was not enough savoury food left at the top of the final col as you’re also craving for it rather than only sugary stuff. That’s just the tiny details that can make or break the reputation of an event.

Alexander Tanti: What you said about actually feeling and experiencing first-hand what a participant is going through is very, very important. That experience can suddenly give you a different direction as to what you need to offer, to who and when.

Mark Turner: I think that obviously, you can get feedback through surveys post-event, but if you have someone that’s senior in your own organization out there competing, then when they see something that’s happening, they’re able to communicate it and that goes straight to the top of those in command. You can make a change during the event itself, and you’re able to resolve those things right there and then, or at least make it a priority for the next day. Surveys are great, but they’re post-event. People also forget some of the details that were important, especially if they had a great day; they are more likely to forget tiny details that they would have made incremental improvements.

Alexander Tanti: Indeed. We may need to come up with live racecheck reviews during the event!!

Mark Turner: It’s important to get quick hot feedback at the time that people feel it rather than through a hazy view post-event. There are so many tiny details that even as the organizer, you’re not going to know. But I think what you’re measuring with racecheck post-event is useful because you force the participant to think of many different aspects of the event and, as a result, get a lot more detail. But still. It’s mostly the big things that you remember. The devil is in the detail, and that’s what’s so hard about events. Usually, organisers get the big picture right. Things like the concept, the crisis management side of things etc., but there are so many more details that all add up to build a great experience.

Alexander Tanti: How did you come up with the multi-day format? And why did you think that would eventually be a success?

Mark Turner: For me, it’s all about generating emotion and facilitating an event that gets people to experience different levels of emotion. The thing about multi-day is it creates a whole different level of bonding and connections between people, which ultimately comes from suffering together over multiple days. It creates bonds for life. What usually happens in one-day events is people generally arrive a few hours before the race, they might meet a few people at breakfast or whatever, take part, and then they’ll usually depart quite quickly afterwards. In multi-day events, you just meet lots of different people over longer periods of time. You meet the people you’re on the racecourse with. The people at the front, the back, and everywhere in between. And that diversity is what makes it special I think. On day one, like in most multi-day events, most people go out too hard and then on day two, the brain tells the body, “Okay. You gotta turn this down a bit”, so everyone’s feeling sluggish and rough. “How the hell am I going to do this?” Usually, by day three, people start to get stronger. The emotions that are created on that rollercoaster of perceived effort and tiredness, then the rejoice of feeling good again, you know, that’s where the energy comes from. It’s an interesting journey. Multi-day events are more likely to help generate life-changing experiences.

Alexander Tanti: Was that something you felt was missing from the large-scale marathons you were involved with before?

Mark Turner: Yeah, I think the big difference from a one-day event where someone runs for three hours or even an ultra trail where someone’s running for 24 hours or 36 hours is the incredible bonds that can happen in multi-day events. They get to meet each other the first day, and then they have the next day and then the next etc. So I think there’s a reason why they’re not lots of multi-day events happening because they are much harder to organize, but actually, they’re just the way that you really create huge value for people.

Alexander Tanti: Do you deliberately design the event to promote bonding between people? Do you get them to start in certain groups and create situations where they can mingle etc., or would you say it’s more natural?

Mark Turner: Natural, I’d say, but I think you also need to think about a format that keeps people together for as much time as possible. With the UltraSwim 33.3 format, we did a first test event last year, where we really tried not to have the faster swimmers disappear, off recovering in the hotel while others are still out in the water. We are trying to keep people of different abilities together in the same space, on the boat, and at the finish line. That’s very hard to do on something like a marathon with the fastest runners finishing, and then they’re gone. It’s a super interesting challenge how you create moments that bring all those people together.

As an event organizer, you need to act as a facilitator, creating a platform for people to have a great experience that inspires them or helps them to gain confidence. Another fundamental ingredient is injecting a bit of fear and worry into the mix. There has to be some discomfort created in the months before when you’re thinking of the event that’s coming, and you’re starting to get a bit apprehensive about it. If you get that, it means you’ve got the right formula, and as a participant, you’ve entered the right event because you wake up uncomfortable about what’s coming later in the year or day.

You’ve entered an event where you train for a bit more than you might have done, and it doesn’t matter whether you’re at the front or the back. You just got to experience discomfort because that discomfort then turns into nerves, which turns into a reward and a great buzz. It’s a great feeling when people normally go home as better people in their heads.

And that’s what sport is so good at. And that’s why Multi-Day events are so special. They multiply the impact,…

Alexander Tanti: From sailing to running, to cycling, from one-day events to multi-day events in 23 different countries to now the Ultra Swim… A lot of this goes against conventional advice in terms of picking a niche and becoming really, really good at it. Most of the time, that means picking a location or a sport. How do you jump from sport to sport to different formats and countries while still delivering amazing events?

Mark Turner: It’s been great to have experience in different sports. I’m not an expert in any of them, and sailing is probably the one where I’ve spent the longest, but so much of it carries across between sports. We were just talking about the importance of generating emotion. Having this as a goal across all the different event types while having the right experts in the team makes it easier to replicate regardless of sport type and format. You do need specialist knowledge, of course, but we’ve always managed to find that specialist knowledge.

I’ve always enjoyed taking our business into new sports, but each time you’re looking for an expert to help you. I know lots of people that have been in the same sport for 40 years, and, you know, everyone knows them, and they know everyone, and it’s great, but I think you also can get a little bit stale. So for me, I enjoy the challenge, you know?

I’ve had as many failures as successes along the way, but I enjoy the challenge of entering a new sector and then trying to understand the ecosystem. So I’m enjoying that with swimming right now.

Swimming is a sport that I always did when I was younger and got back into it in 2015 and started doing longer-distance swimming, which I had never done before. As a teenager, 200 meters was as long as I’d go. So I did a 5K swim in New Zealand, north of Auckland and my God, it was incredible, and that took me back to the sport after a 25-year break in reality — albeit in open water this time.. I think interest and energy are now building in open water swimming, so I think the timing is good. Open-water swimming is really growing. It’s a niche without question, a niche within a niche even, but it’s growing very fast. As a sport, it’s probably the healthiest of everything and more and more research points to that — both physical and mental health. There is something special about the water.. It’s a small sport with lots of super passionate people, lots of tradition, some good, some not so good perhaps, but it’s very accessible. You don’t need a lot of money to try or take part in it.

And as an organiser, it’s nice to go into a new sport and format, try to understand the nuances of it, and then try and see if you can prove it works and help develop it. Coming from the other side, you take some best practices with you from one sport and see what applies. You then learn what you need to learn about the differences, and then you’re normally like, “Okay, what can we change completely? What could we do that is really different”. and…

Alexander Tanti: From the sounds of it, you’re a specialist in creating emotion during the event and anticipation ahead of the event. Your speciality is in facilitating bonds between people and then looking to kind of replicate that regardless of the field of play, whereas in the nitty-gritty stuff, you rely on experts to help you out.

Mark Turner: Yeah, and, you know, with UltraSwim 33.3, I have a small team, so I’m back in the detail, which I haven’t been in for a long time. With my first company, we grew to over 120 people. And then, when I ran the Volvo Ocean Race, a sailing race around the world, I had up to 200 people in that team. It had a corporate aspect to it in terms of reporting to the owners as CEO. So it’s been a long time since I returned with a really tiny team and not many resources, but that’s been super interesting. When you don’t have big resources you are also forced to make better decisions sometimes too. In the last few years, a lot of things have changed, a lot of tools have changed, marketing has gone all digital, and I’m not an expert in any way in any of that, so I’ve always had to rely on a strong team around me. Whether it’s a project management specialist, on the operations side, or on the communication side, you need that knowledge. It’s quite refreshing to start over in a new sport but to do that you need to be comfortable asking the stupid question at the beginning and genuinely not care what others think, but also be humble enough to listen to others’ expertise.

You need to be able to look at all aspects of an event and keep asking, “Why”. “Why are we doing it like that” “Could we do that differently?” or “yes traditionally we do that, but….”

There are many competing variables when organising an event, and you’ve got to judge what the right mix is. And that’s what I enjoy doing, looking at the event as a whole concept and of course, the commercial side of it. You have to run a good business to create a great product. It’s tough to start an event and get it to the point where it pays for itself or becomes profitable very quickly because you’re always investing. It’s super interesting to look at each sport and see what the different business models are, and then try and build a new or better model.

I’ve always been most interested in niche products where there’s an element of premium, where you can sell a higher value proposition, as well as keeping it accessible.

That’s why I’m now interested in swimming. I’ve obviously seen cycling and triathlon premium value propositions evolve and massively transform over the past 30 years, but swimming’s just at the beginning of something like that. I don’t know how big it’ll get nor how far that it will go. But I think that’s super interesting because if you can grow the top of the pyramid in terms of what people are willing to pay to go and do an event, then you can make a better event. It doesn’t mean it’s less comfortable, doesn’t need to be less accessible, but it allows you to grow a bigger and better event. If you’re only doing pure numbers with maximum numbers on the start line, that’s a different model, and you have to have very big numbers.

Each sport has the same constraints in some ways. But what I think is probably more complicated nowadays, compared to 20 years ago, is accessing specific pockets of communities, despite all the available digital tools.

Alexander Tanti: What I think is special about open water swimming is that it’s perhaps one of the last frontiers in sport that are less susceptible to distraction during the activity. There’s less time to look at your watch, or your heart rate, or to be distracted by data and music. It facilitates such an incredible environment of pure tranquility and pure quiet. Just you and your thoughts, directly connected to nature

I think that a trend has been building in that direction in the past decade for sure. People are looking for experiences, rather than a PB. and going after real experiences and emotional experiences and connecting with other people rather than chasing PBs. I think that was more, you know, 2008 to 2015. But since then, people really, really seem to be looking for experiences.

Mark Turner: There are more and more research projects that indicate that something unique happens to people in the water. Without gravity, completely neutralized, and the sound of water.

There isn’t any doubt about the mental health benefits of it and with some of the longer events, you are able to completely zone out, like a form of meditation. I had a period of family loss in 2015, and I was going through a lot, so I started doing mindfulness on an app, and I realised, you know, “that’s exactly how it feels when I swim, and it’s much better that way because I’m also active. I’m training at the same time and being physical and can go on autopilot as I don’t have to be conscious of the road. You can just disappear into this space, a small part of the brain only checking your direction if in open water, and there’s something super powerful about it, and I think more people are discovering that. And again, you can retain the competitive element if you like.

So yeah, I think there’s something really special about this sport, and I think it’s gonna continue to explode as more people are coming from other sports. There’s a certain intensity required in triathlon, but that comes at the cost of the family and multi-sport training and the time commitment etc.

Swimming is extraordinary from a physical point of view. It’s a full-body workout. And you don’t need to do a three-hour swim to get a good training session in. And you don’t need much equipment. And no impact loads on tired knees…

Alexander Tanti: We briefly spoke about business models. How would you advise organisers from being overly reliant on a single sponsor? Are there any good insights you’ve gathered from all these years to protect your event and ensure longevity?

Mark Turner: The first thing to ask is, what is the structure behind it? Many events start as an association of volunteers. It then starts to get more serious but through passion, and everyone volunteering, your cost structure remains low. So, I suppose the first bit of advice would be to the people that are developing a new event, is to ensure that the right structure is in place. Regardless of whether you operate as a group of volunteers or a commercial business, you still need to build reserves.

Perhaps, you could be charging that little bit more so that you are able to put some money in the bank and foresee the moment that the sponsorship might not come through for some reason. By treating your event as a professional business, you might build more of a contingency to be able to absorb the shock of losing a major sponsor or venue pulling out or something else. That’s just the nature of things, and it will happen sooner or later to everyone, but it’s hard to do in not-for-profit cultured organisations. Organisers are usually split between those that are just doing it on an absolute minimum set-up, but that’s not necessarily a good thing for the stakeholders or your community of participants because when it does fall apart, then you’ve let everyone down.

So, the argument that, well, no, we’re not a business because we’re not trying to make a profit, well, maybe you should be trying to put some reserves in the bank because otherwise, you’re gonna let your community down. The time will come when you’re going to lose a sponsor, even the most loyal; sometimes, the person at the top will change and its game over.

Even if you’re in a non-profit organisation, I think it is fundamental. I co-founded a charity in Switzerland that takes young people in remission from cancer on sailing trips (www.lemanhope.ch). And from day one, I decided to run it like a business. It’s a charity, but we run it like a business. When trying to attract donations, we approached companies with a business proposition, and they responded to that. And that’s the right way. It’s the right way to do it. And I think that approach again applies in the same way, as much as possible to volunteer organisations and association sport businesses.

When you treat it as a business and set it up as a business, you need to be aware that there are significant risks and that you’ve got to have the ability to cushion any blows and be there for the long term. Being around for the long term allows you to build a consistent and trustworthy reputation. Sometimes something happens in the run-up to an event where you think that it would have been far more sensible to cancel it, but I’ve never wanted to do that unless there’s absolutely no other way. Reputation is everything, and Racecheck is one of the tools to help us build it and showcase it, because, ultimately, a long-term reputation comes through being delivering consistent quality events and making consistent decisions. This creates loyal customers and stakeholders that have been with me from the beginning. My ability to do that would have been limited without making sure to build reserves, and make sure I run my events as a business.

Alexander Tanti: Regarding reserves and cash flow, there’s an increasing trend lately that most registrations come in last minute. That obviously applies pressure in the business as you always need to pay for things beforehand. How do you protect against that?

Mark Turner: We’ve gone through a few different trends in the last three years. I think last year, especially in Europe, there was a big decrease in numbers in mass participation events because people didn’t want to make early decisions for obvious reasons like covid, and that was very tricky. At the back end of the covid chapter, and that was very, very tricky. There will always be people that will plan really early and people that plan really late, but so many planned late and then realised they weren’t prepared for doing the event so didn’t! Although now the dial seems to be swinging back the other way. I think that people are again ready to take risks and make long-term commitments to events. But yeah, since Covid, many more people will just leave it to the last minute.

I don’t have any magic answers for it. Still, in general, multi-day or long-distance endurance events will force an earlier decision, as people don’t generally decide last minute to do a marathon or a half-ironman, as they need to commit and they need the time to train for it. So adding longer distance events in your portfolio may be a good way to attract earlier registrations and the cash flow that will cushion some of the cash requirements for your shorter events as well.

Alexander Tanti: Another thing that I found very interesting is that when starting a company or starting a new event, it seems to me that one of your strengths is your ability to outsource the right roles to the right people. I think that’s a huge strength. How do you go about creating a winning team each time?

Mark Turner: For me, number one is character. Not necessarily experience or a CV. Events are super high-pressure, they’re tiring and require long hours. Who do you know is fit for purpose? It’s the kind of people that are ready to give, and they’re not counting the hours. It’s definitely about the character rather than the competence. Because I think a lot of competencies and knowledge can be shared. But after that, delivering an event is about having people that are open-minded and flexible and ready to jump into those roles and fill the gaps when necessary. It’s people that are genuinely inspired by seeing what the participants do.

It’s not a normal job working in an event, and I see lots of volunteers at every event. Very few events can take place without them. It’s so interesting that volunteers are often there because they just get a buzz from seeing the participants push themselves and be rewarded at the finish line. Character, above all else, is shared across different languages and cultures. I think we were up to 23 countries where we had events in 2015/16 with OC sport and working with different people in different cultures. It can be pretty challenging, but still, within each culture, you can pick the right character and the right values and why someone is there.

Alexander Tanti: But how can you understand whether someone has the character and value required?

Mark Turner: I think ideally, every interview would be on the back of a bike while climbing the third col of the day. Seeing how people handle discomfort. For sailing projects, we used to go to the mountains and just put people in different environments and push really hard and just see how they react. You know, are they taking charge? Are they helping the people in the back?

Of course, you can’t do that all of the time. But you can read from people’s CVs what they’ve done in their life. If they’ve tried different sports and experiences, that’s usually a pretty good indication that they’re open-minded and ready to do different things. There’s no right or easy answer, but these are some of the tools I use.

Alexander Tanti: That’s really interesting. So someone organising a local 10k could gather a bunch of candidates and organise a one-day group activity somewhere in nature and see how they deal with unexpected stuff.

Mark Turner: Of course, you do not want to make it tough on the person who may be less fit, but actually just something that pushes people a little bit. That way, you see their real characters.

Alexander Tanti: How do you find volunteers in all these different locations?

Mark Turner: Yeah, it’s interesting.

Mark Turner: Again, there are obviously different cultures in different places. But people aren’t looking for that much, you know. They’re looking to be valued for their contribution.. That’s what they’re really looking for. An opportunity to feel like they’re contributing, and then they clearly get something back from receiving gratitude from the participants. But the massive key part is running it as a program. I’m not an expert in any way, but I know that in different countries, you have to approach it differently because in some countries, the concept of volunteering is not really there. So it’s definitely venue by venue.

You can try to find local clubs and contribute to those clubs in some way, but the bottom line is that you must present your event as something really inspirational. I think this is the best way to find people who want to get involved, whether that’s young people who want to get some experience or older people who have a bit more time on their hands.

There’s never a shortage of volunteers, but it’s not always obvious how to find them.

Alexander Tanti: If there’s one piece of advice you would give to anybody looking to start in the industry, what would that be?

Mark Turner: If you’re starting out, I think you shouldn’t go and start something new unless you are super, super passionate and clear about the outcome you’re looking for. It doesn’t mean that you love that sport or that it’s your sport. Sometimes it’s good to stay away from the sport you love because you end up not doing them very much after you start organising them! This is probably the number one piece of advice. Don’t go into a sport because it’s your sport and the one you’re most passionate about, thinking that you will manage to keep doing it as much as you did before because you won’t.

Also, I think you can’t go into event organisation without a lot of passion and energy. It’s not easy, and you will have to jump over barrier after barrier. You’re unlikely to make a fortune from it financially, but you can definitely make a lot of emotional profit, let’s call it…Approaching it with the right passion and energy will make you feel good about what you’re doing in your life as you genuinely transform people’s lives. There’s always someone for whom that was the turning point in their life, and you gave that to them. That’s incredibly gratifying. And running it as a business allows you to stay in it for longer and inspire even more people.

Alexander Tanti: Thanks so much, Mark — Brilliant chat.

You can connect with Mark on Strava, and Instagram @markturner888. You can also visit the UltraSwim 33.3 Facebook page here.

Originally published at https://racecheck.substack.com.

A Conversation with Mark Turner - Founder of Ultra Swim 33.3 was originally published in Racecheck on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

My conversation with Sam was more insightful and educational than I could have ever imagined. Despite being a relative “newbie” in the industry, with Ultra X only formed in 2018, he spoke with the kind of authority and confidence one would expect from an organiser with decades of experience. Not only did he, with his co-founder, manage to successfully launch and grow a series of 19 races in 14 locations with a team of just 5 people, but they also did it through Covid, in a format that largely depends on foreign travel!

Intentional, self-conscious and humble, Sam lives and breathes his mission, making multi-stage ultra-marathons accessible to everyday people. An inspiring conversation with plenty of educational gems for organisers of any sport type, size and location.

Alexander Tanti: Sam, fantastic to have you as part of the series. Looking through your site, it’s amazing to see how much you guys have grown over the past couple of years. How about we start by giving me a little bit of background? How did you come about organising races?

Sam Heward: I t’s a long story, but it can be summarised into a short story. The essence, really, is that I stumbled into multi-stage racing completely by accident when I was quite young (22) and was not previously a runner. I never participated in a marathon or anything like that. And I signed down for a multi-stage event in the desert, thinking that it would be a kind of a one-off tick off the bucket list and move on; what I found was that it was the most incredible experience, but also a little bit frustrating that I was one of very few younger participants and I would constantly sit down next to people in a pub or at a dinner party, and they would say, “ah no It’s not for me, I couldn’t do that. That’s impossible”.

I was always entrepreneurial in nature. I wanted to do my own thing, I wanted to set up a business, and I think it took probably a couple of years before I realized that what I wanted to do was try and encourage more people to get into this space and to make it more accessible and to put on these events. And so, that’s kind of why Ultra X was born, it was essentially to try and put on these experiences. These multi-stage events encourage more and more people to get into them and make them more accessible.

And I had a friend, a guy called Jamie Sparks. He’s now the co-founder of Ultra X and at the same time that I was having these thoughts, he was organizing an event in Jordan, which was called the Wadi Rum Ultra, which I actually ran. After that, we sat down together, and I was essentially like, “You’ve got quite a good gig mate. I would like to do that, and I think there’s a big opportunity in the trail and ultra space. I think Marathon is not enough anymore. I think people are wanting to go longer and further and I think there’s something we can do.”

It took about a year, but eventually, we came together. We have different skill sets and different backgrounds. I was in finance before, and we rebranded the event as The Ultra X Jordan, and that was our first event, 250 kilometres split over five stages. Ultra X was set up at the back end of 2018, and we then had one year where it was just Jamie and I doing everything and managing the events we put on.

The idea was always to have a series, as we thought it was very important to create a brand. Creating a series meant that you could have an amazing experience in Jordan and then you could go and have an amazing experience in Sri Lanka or Mexico or wherever. 2020 and 2021 were obviously quite interesting times which forced us to adapt quite a bit and hold back on some of the growth that we would have liked to have. But coming out of the pandemic, we just returned to the initial idea which was to put on a load of events all over the world, encouraging more people to try Multi-stage racing and to create a cool and fun brand in the trail and ultra space.

We’re now feeling more confident about the industry, feeling more confident about the space and the growth of the number of runners, and we’re really optimistic about the future.

Alexander Tanti: That initial race in Jordan that was rebranded. What were the biggest differences before and after the rebranding,

Sam Heward: Nothing significant, as it wasn’t us taking over a different event. Jamie ran the event with someone else, and essentially, that someone else then became me, and we set up a new company. So, it was very much the same template. This particular event initially started as an expedition. It’s a long story, but around 2011 someone ran across Jordan raising money for charity by himself and organized a team of locals to support him. Jamie met this person and said that sounds amazing. He wanted to organize it as an expedition rather than a race, and so in 2015–2016, the Jordan Ultra was born, which was essentially five people trying to cover 300 kilometres over six days, and it was savage, unsurprisingly.

Since then, it took on more of a traditional multi-stage race format. And then, since joining forces, we did make some small tweaks which were the result of us sitting down and saying, “Okay, we want to do this seriously; how can we make little changes that differentiate us from a typical Multi-stage Ultra Marathon and how can we improve on that? How do we make it more accessible?”

For example, traditional multi-stage events require you to be completely self-sufficient. This requires a competitor to turn up with all their kit, sleeping bag, food and carry all that for the duration of the event. We thought that offering support could potentially change the dynamic of the events massively, and it did not seem like a massive operational change.

So we said we would go ahead and try that along with a few other similar things which we thought would enhance the runner experience while not affecting the overall feel of the event.

We’ve always received great feedback from our events, so every year, we make minor tweaks. We debrief really critically on every detail of the event, and we always get better, and the more events we have now, the better we’re getting because of this constant feedback loop. So they’re always going to be minor changes, but I think the overall format and feel of the event has been set on from day one and that ties in with who we want to be as a company. The kind of values that we hold and I think is expressed through all of our events and operations.

Alexander Tanti: You said earlier that making the sport more accessible was probably one of the biggest motivators for you. Does that mean easing the administrative and logistical burden of participating in these events rather than making the run itself “easier”?

Sam Heward: Our hypothesis when we started was that this type of event is too expensive, and it’s too hard, and that’s why people aren’t doing them. And what we discovered is yes, those are certainly factors, but the biggest piece is education. It is a fact that the average Joe does not know what a multi-stage race is, and in their minds, they anchor their expectation on a well-known challenge such as the London Marathon. You see people doing the London Marathon, which is 42k, and compare it with what you hear is a 220k five-stage event, you say, “How is that even possible? How could I do that five times in the heat of the desert and up and down mountains?”

But obviously, in reality, it’s very different because the intensity is so much lower. It’s much more of a hike, an expedition and an adventure rather than a high-intensity race. The people that participate in it and complete it are not full-time athletes. They’ve got families, they’ve got jobs, they smoke occasionally, and still, they finish. So, actually, the biggest shift in our theory around this is how we can give people the resources and education to get them to believe that they can do it, because they can; but it’s a difficult step to make.

I think the biggest thing is trying to showcase that people who finish and do our events are people they can associate with. It’s all very well showing the elite athletes running impressive times, but who can really relate to that person?

So we put a lot of effort into actually saying, “This is Sarah, and Sarah is an NHS nurse, and Sarah works 45 hours a week but still gets in her full runs. She finished Jordan and had a great experience.” It’s a constant learning, and we’re always making tweaks and changes, but I think for me, that’s the most important thing is how can we make the sport more accessible.

Alexander Tanti: I guess that even people who have heard of these multi-stage events before, it’s usually the more well-known legacy challenges such as the Marathon de Sables, which are portrayed as these insanely brutal events that will challenge every ounce of you physically and mentally. I guess the effects of those marketing efforts are not doing you any favours.

Sam Heward: Yeah, and I actually think part of the problem, and I’m not necessarily blaming the organizers because it’s been a specific tactic, but a lot of these events like to have a tagline as the toughest race in the world and that you have to be super tough to do them. I don’t think that’s true. I really don’t. It’s a difficult balancing act because these events obviously require preparation, planning, and to be taken seriously, but that’s not to say they are only for the very few. I think getting that messaging right, that gives people the confidence to believe they can do it if they put their mind to it is really important rather than portraying the event as elitist and exclusive only to some.

Alexander Tanti: So you organised your first event, do you remember any specific moment after the finish of that first event which gave you that confidence to go all-in and start planning for the next one and the next one?

Sam Heward: I think firstly, I was very adamant with the idea that there was something there which could be done better. That’s not a critique of any organizers because there are so many amazing events out there. But I thought I could put on a good event. And from the very first experience I had as a race director, we got amazing feedback. However, and partly it’s through ignorance, you don’t necessarily realize many of the difficulties you will encounter when you start a business. When I got involved, Jordan had been going for four years, so most of it was already straightforward. It gave me an exaggerated sense of confidence that we’ve got this format. So, we’ll just pick up this model and move it to Sri Lanka and Mexico. Obviously, what you don’t realize is that every event is incredibly unique and requires completely different logistics.

So I think it was maybe a little bit naive, but I think that the key thing was that we got great feedback from our first event and that made me believe that with the right people onboard, we could put on great events.

Alexander Tanti: A lot of us, as participants, know the feeling of finishing a really tough event. We understand the sense of achievement and that feeling of gratification you get from finishing such a difficult event. What I’m interested to know is how did it feel as an organiser, seeing your first finishers cross the line?

Sam Heward: It was amazing; there’s nothing like it. I remember the first, maybe even three years of events were terrifying. You’d panic about all these things that could go wrong in the week and in the build-up. You are so concerned about messing something up. Whereas, now, I get so much more enjoyment out of them and very much see them as “this is your stage, an opportunity to do something great”. You have 300 days in the office every year and just 30 days when we are out there, so you may as well enjoy it.

Firstly, the adulation of just seeing people across the line is amazing. The whole time, being behind the scenes, whether you’re a race director, whether you’re the owner, whether you’re a volunteer, you go through a unique experience. It’s not the same, but it’s a similar experience as the runners in that there are moments where you think, “Why am I doing this? Why am I giving up my weekend to put up gazebos at six in the morning? Why am I out here without food for 12 hours? Why am I up late?” But then you get to the end of the week, and you have that sense of satisfaction and reward which comes from supporting these incredible people. So, I had that kind of feeling, and I still get that, and it’s the best thing in the world. At the same time, you feel the elation of “We did it, it worked out, everything came good, I think we put on a good experience. I think these people are happy..” which is amazing.

Seeing something you’ve created come to life, and I think particularly when we started to launch new events. You’d go through the process of literally throwing darts at a map and then going to a place, meeting people, choosing the course and then, a year or two years later, coming back to that place and delivering an event is just awesome.

Alexander Tanti: What was your second event after Jordan?

Sam Heward: Sri Lanka, which was one of the most stressful weeks of my life, definitely. But we got through it, and then we had Jordan again in 2019.

Alexander Tanti: Why did you pick Sri Lanka?

Sam Heward: There are probably four or five main factors that go into our location planning. Probably the main one is it’s got to be somewhere that really excites people as a destination. This comes in even before looking at the quality of trails, before the logistics etc. We want somewhere that, you’re gonna turn to the person sitting next to you and say, I’m going here to do an Ultra Marathon, and they’re like, “Wow, that is awesome.” So we thought Sri Lanka had that X factor, and at the time, it was fairly stable. Unfortunately, given the current situation, I don’t think we’re gonna be doing that again for a while, if ever again. It’s a bit of a tricky country. But yeah, at the time it was stable, with very good connections from Europe and the Middle East where we had a bit of an audience. As Sri Lanka is so used to tourism, they had very good partner contacts that we could use and work within the country.

Alexander Tanti: Okay, so you choose Sri Lanka. Then I guess you go out there to scout out the place. Do you reach out to the local runners to help you discover some great routes? What was the next step?

Sam Heward: Typically, once we’ve decided on a country usually what happens is we have a handful of countries that we’re having discussions with at any one time. And that process initially is just outreach to anyone you think will be useful in that country, whether it’s the tourism board, whether it’s local race organizers, travel agents etc.

Some locations will fall behind because you’ll realize there are complications, while some locations will naturally arise as a better fit. You will, of course, reach out to runners and people that are doing trail running to get a feel for where would be a good location to organize the event and what’s the weather like, and then ideally, we would get to a point where we have a lot of confidence over a location. We then go about looking for a partner. So for all our international events, we have a local partner on the ground. Their role, depending on the location and their expertise, ideally would be our long-term partner over the next three to five years.

We’d get to a point where we have three or four people having discussions about that, and we then choose the one which we thought put together the best proposal. This is all done remotely, and it’s only really at this stage where once we get confident over the location, then the partner and finally of the operational plan that we would say okay, yeah, this sounds good, we’ll organize a recce and come out meet. We see the course as much as we can, drive as much as we can and get a real feel for it, and it’s not until we’ve done all those steps that we would then consider whether we can really launch it.

Alexander Tanti: You said that the week of the event was incredibly stressful, so I suspect there’s a good story there.

Sam Heward: Yeah, I think there is an education piece there. Basically around what the local operators were expected to do, what they had promised, and what they were actually capable of doing. In the end, it was fine, and it wasn’t a huge event, just 30 runners. It just meant that our crew, which was comprised of five core staff and about 20 volunteers, had to work bloody hard setting up the camps, marking the route setting the checkpoints. The local operator, apart from setting up permissions, hadn’t really done enough. And it was a really good learning curve in hindsight because as a result of that, our planning and approvals checks have massively changed. Most importantly, we also learned that in the face of battle, we can still put on an event and make it work. It’s amazing how you can solve problems when you can stay calm and work as a team and communicate.

But yeah, I remember we were driving around in a Land Rover at two in the morning every day to check the route was drivable because while our local partners would say it was drivable, we wouldn’t trust them until we’d actually done it. So yeah, there were some challenges, and we had to reroute a day because we had an elephant on course. That was fun.

Alexander Tanti: Because I guess you can’t just run around it.

Sam Heward: You might be able to. It could be risky, though.

Alexander Tanti: So, from the sounds of it, you have this very core team who presumably are based in the UK. But you then have to outsource a lot of the local operational stuff to local teams, and your experience in Sri Lanka gave you a bit of material to work on going forward in terms of how you go about choosing partners etc. Do you now have a checklist to ensure that the partner will be reliable?

Sam Heward: Kind of, it’s not actually a checklist, but we have prepared four key documents which are required for every event. One of them’s circulated with our entire crew, a couple of them are internal, and most of them are prepared in the last few weeks before the event. It’s essentially what we call a battle plan. It is a thorough plan for the entire week, and we also require quite a lot of information and documentation well in advance of the event. This does solve a lot of problems, and now we also only pay people fully after the event.

Alexander Tanti: And I guess finding volunteers, you leave that to the local partner as well?

Sam Heward: No, we organise all our volunteers. We’ve got a very good community, and they travel worldwide with us to get involved in our events.

Alexander Tanti: Interesting, so it’s not necessarily locals.

Alexander Tanti: Okay, that’s very interesting. Why do you think people are willing to travel halfway around the world just to volunteer for an event?

Sam Heward: I think because it’s a genuinely amazing experience. There’s nothing quite like it, and it is incredibly rewarding. I think there are probably maybe three different types of people that do it. Someone that doesn’t necessarily know that they want to do an event but want to experience it. Then, you get a lot of people that are looking to get an experience of how the organizing of an event like that happens, and finally, you get a lot of runners who want race credit, or they might think about doing it next year. It’s a hard week, but it’s an incredibly rewarding thing to be a part of and it’s an expenses paid holiday. So, for some people, it’s well worth it.

Alexander Tanti: I’d like to go back to the “changing the perception of multi-stage events” piece. So you are trying to change the perception of this particular segment within running; I can imagine it must have been tough. And, I’m just trying to think as a new organiser who’s decided to start organising a uniquely different type of events within a very well-established sport type like swimming or running, or triathlons, whatever. How could they go about it? Marketing that new concept or trying to change established perceptions.

Sam Heward: Unfortunately, there’s no one single thing that we’ve done or are doing, and if it were as simple as that, that’d be amazing. It’s really just a matter of having a clear message and drip-feeding that over a load of different platforms and mechanisms, whether it’s the conversations we have with our competitors or the way we talk to them in race briefings and post-event and communications.

Also, the way we do all of our social media and email marketing, we’ve always been very conscious about our tone of voice and coming across as human and real. Then also, really focusing on telling competitors’ stories, as much as possible, showcasing the people doing it. And I think the final thing we’ve done, which I guess potentially is a little bit different from some organizers, is we’ve always had a community focus. We’ve always focused on community events, and that would be an event which actually really has very little to do with running or ultra running or educating about ultra running. It is an event where we get people who have done our events in a social environment with people who might be interested to find out more or thinking about taking part. Or, it could be something very different whether it’s a camping weekend or whether it’s a film screening, in a bar, or anything along those lines. So it’s just, trying to encourage the connection of our runners with people who haven’t done them. it’s a slow and gradual process because I think the most important factor of getting a message across in this space is still word of mouth. And I think working out how to encourage that Is always a challenge, and it’s something which is very difficult to track.

Alexander Tanti: Do you have a dedicated marketing team?

Sam Heward: We’re a pretty small team. There are four of us, full-time. And then one who comes in three days a week. So, Jamie kind of manages sales and marketing at the moment. And then, we have another person that manages marketing and partnerships as well. But we all chip in, and I’m quite involved as well, I think. Yeah, it (a dedicated marketing position) would be something we might look to create, but at the moment, we’re small and lean.

Alexander Tanti: Speaking about Jamie, your co-founder, earlier and that your skills are complementary. I’m interested to hear what are those complementary skills. And also, what do you think creates a successful partnership between Co-founders?

Sam Heward: Yeah, I’ll start with why I think we work well, and I’m always cautious about offering this kind of advice because I think, particularly with relationships and partnerships, it’s so personal, and what works for some people may not work for others. You can read a hundred management books, and they’ll tell you a hundred different things. I think I’m a big advocate of having an open mind and learning from others. And then working out what works for you and what feels right. I think what I’d say works incredibly well is Jamie and I share this vision that we are creating an amazing experience. These events are life-changing; these events should be for everyone. And our end goal is completely aligned and always has been. We see the world completely differently in almost everything else, and the result of that is, we have a lot of discussions about a lot of things business related. Still, generally, we get the right answer because we do discuss things and we do see the world in different ways. So I think often, co-founders or people that organise things together do it with someone very similar to them, and that’s great. And that can be really easy at times. But I often wonder whether that’s ideal.

Jamie’s very much brand and sales focus. He’ll always be the one to say that that design is not right, that the text font needs to be that etc. I’m terrible at that, and I simply wouldn’t notice.

So, that works well. I’m much more operational events management focussed, and he’s very much brand, marketing and sales. I generally take care of finance and, I guess, more long-term strategy and planning.

Alexander Tanti: Got it. I think you hit the nail on the head there about making sure that you both have a very common goal and being exactly on the same page in terms of what you want to achieve. I think the peripherals about how you will achieve that can be up for discussion.

Sam Heward: Yeah, I think there’s strategy and there’s tactics, isn’t there? I think as a startup business, you’ve got to have a strategy, you’ve got to have an overall direction, and that’s got to be consistent throughout. But then, if you go more granular, the tactics can change at any one moment, and I think you need to be receptive and open to that. It may sound obvious, but communication is just everything. Talking to each other the whole time with honesty. And I think, having now managed various team sizes, it’s amazing how treating people with respect and honesty, giving them space and responsibility, but asking them for care, communication, and honesty has become our formula for creating a good team.

Alexander Tanti: You mentioned that your background is in finance, right?

Alexander Tanti: One thing that I think was very insightful from my conversation with Mark was how much focus he puts on ensuring that the organisation is fiscally responsible so that they’re in it for the long term.

You started in 2018 and went through a very difficult time with covid that speaks volumes about how well you navigated the financial aspect of that challenge, ensuring that you’re there for the long term. Do you have any advice for new organisers about approaching the topic or financing events, of when to take a risk vs being conservative?

Sam Heward: I read Mark’s interview with a lot of interest and think he put it nicely. Since we started, we’ve probably over-focused on price, and we always wanted to be accessible. We wanted to keep our prices low and ensure that we could encourage more people to get involved. We never intended for the price to be a stumbling block, and as a result, we’ve tried to make operations as lean as possible. I think that particularly over the last few years where we’ve had a few disruptions, we’ve been tighter on finances than we would have liked, and as a result, next year we’re playing catch up, and we have to increase everything, I think.

Firstly, I’d say organisers shouldn’t be afraid of charging higher prices for a quality service, providing that they’re not wasting money and feel like they’re acting responsibly etc.

We’ve definitely fallen into the trap of over-emphasizing low prices. As a co-founder, I know that increasing prices is the right thing to do from a business perspective because it’s the way that we can ensure that we’ll put on great events in three, five, or ten years. But there’s still this thing in the back of my head, as a runner and as a member of our community, that I don’t want to increase prices. And I’ve got to shut out that voice. I think a lot of people that are small business owners and care a lot about their customers are eventually going to have that dilemma. But making the business survive has to be the key thing because you’ve got to remember that you can’t put on these events otherwise.

Linking into that, I think profit has almost become a dirty word for many people, but profit is the only way that reinvestment can be made, and growth can be made. So, take us for an example, if we never made a profit, we would never be able to put on another event. It would be as simple as that. We might be able to put on Ultra X Jordan every year, but we wouldn’t be able to invest in further resources etc. So I think maybe moving away from that mentality and ensuring you’re more than covering your cost is incredibly important as an organiser. Particularly in the event space, I thought the way Mark put it was incredibly sensible in that we’ve got a see the future. Essentially, we set prices maybe 14 months out for an event so that we pay out most of our costs on the day of the event. So you’ve got to create a bit of a buffer there and be sensible. To what extent, I guess, depends on your perception of risk and what reserves you have, but all those things are useful.

Alexander Tanti: I share your thoughts around profit almost being stigmatised in this industry. From the participant’s perspective, when they have no visibility on the cost and resources required to deliver a great experience, the standards for what makes a ticket expensive or not are purely subjective. I know people are bashing organisations like Ironman, saying they’re all about the profit, but at the same time, they’re a company with employees and costs, delivering great experiences, and they have to survive somehow for them to continue to offer great experiences for more people and more locations. They need to back that up financially.

It’s also an uphill battle for us at Racecheck, with some organisers continuing to think that promoting participant feedback and reviews can only attract a handful of extra entries at the current price rather than seeing the use of social proof as a powerful tool that could help them take their business to a whole different level and be able to justify 20–50% price increases. There are always people willing to pay a premium price for a premium experience.

Sam Heward: Yeah, and I think it requires responsible leaders. I think a lot of people, and probably rightly so, don’t trust big business and don’t like corporations because there have been irresponsible people leading them. There’s been bad use of money and assets etc. So, I’m a trail runner, and I love this space. So I’d like to think that we can grow Ultra X in a responsible way, prioritising good events prioritising keeping prices as low as we can. But at the same time, making sure that we’re also doing that in a fiscally responsible way. And I just hope that other people within the sport and in the events space are doing the same thing, and I genuinely think they are because, actually, you wouldn’t come into this space if you wanted to be a billionaire. There are many other things you could do to achieve that. People like to criticise when they’re sitting at home on their couch, but actually, we’re not in this game because we want to make a load of money. We’re in this because we want to put on good experiences, and that is rewarding in itself.

Alexander Tanti: How many events do you put on right now, and in how many locations?

Sam Heward: We’ll have 14 event locations next year, and that’s 19 races because a few of them have different formats. We’ve always focused on becoming an international multi-stage race series. Covid meant that we became more national and focused more on the UK. We did a few shorter stage events because it was quicker to organise, and we could turn them around fairly fast. Now, we’re on more of a push to get back to the brand we’ve always wanted to be. We’ve now launched Madeira, Morocco and Finland this year. And we’re looking at a couple of new international locations for next year. Then we’re going to take a bit of a pause, have a little review and see where we go for 2025 and 26 as we’re reaching the capacity of what this team can deliver in terms of events.

Alexander Tanti: Not bad for a team of five.. That’s amazing. But it’s also a testament to how this format can be scalable. The system can scale as long as you have the mindset and the checklists and know exactly what to expect from and how to look for the right partners.

Sam Heward: The more we have opportunities to put on events, the more we learn from each of them, and then setting up new events becomes easier. Every single time we do it now, it gets better every single time. So having a series is incredibly useful from that perspective. as it means that if we had someone join our team yesterday, he’s got an event this weekend. He’s got an event next weekend, and that’s such a good learning experience. But if you don’t have that (a series), you need to wait a year to experience an event; that’s your one opportunity to get to grips with understanding how everything works.

Alexander Tanti: Where do you guys see yourselves longer term? Do you have any plans for maybe adding more sports?

Sam Heward: No, no other sports. I can’t see that happening for a long time. I think the key thing for me to create a really strong brand is being recognised for something quite specific. And we really want to be known as the multi-stage, five and two-day trail running events in beautiful parts of the world. Never say never, but I don’t think that’s even in the back of my head now. We’re really focused on creating a global series of amazing, multi-stage events, creating a brand which is well known and getting to the place where you come back from a weekend having done one of our events, and rather than saying I’ve done an ultra marathon over the weekend, to say I’ve done an Ultra X and everyone knows what that means. That’s the dream.

Sam Heward: On a personal level, I just love to get more people into this space and particularly women, particularly minority ethnic groups, which are at the moment quite disproportionately outnumbered. I think we’re going in the right direction, but there’s a lot more to do.

Alexander Tanti: We’re out of time which is a shame as we could probably spend another two hours here, but I think it’s been incredibly insightful. Before closing, f you were to advise somebody looking to start organising races right now, what would be the one thing you would advise?

Sam Heward: I’d tell them that the more you think over it, the more reasons you’ll find not to do it, so don’t dwell over it too much, start, and you’ll make it work. The second thing I’d say is to speak to people. Most organisers are incredibly generous with their time, and if you ask in the right way, there are so many good people in this space, and there are so many experienced people who will give great advice. You can avoid so many potential problems because someone will have been there before a hundred per cent.

Every injury, every whatever has happened at some point in history before and most likely in the last few years and most likely by someone you have a second or third party connection with. So I would say don’t be afraid to ask for advice, don’t be afraid to share your thinking and planning, but yeah, definitely go for it. It’s great to have more people in the space, and if anyone is thinking about it, hit me up.

Alexander Tanti: Perfect.Thank you so much, Sam. Best of luck with everything, and thanks for your time!

Originally published at https://racecheck.substack.com.

A Conversation with Sam Heward - Co-Founder of Ultra X was originally published in Racecheck on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Tom Kerry is one of the most respected figures in our industry and a true Mass Participation Sports Industry veteran with a career spanning over two decades. During his long tenure at Limelight Sports, he has held almost every role imaginable within Mass Participation and is currently their Head of Sport. Simultaneously, he is the Head of Partnerships at Race Nation, a leading technology platform in the UK catering to the needs of mass participation organisers. Furthermore, he is the Director and Chair of the Ealing Half Marathon Legacy Community Interest Company, Mass Sports Organisers Forum Chair, Global Council Member in Mass Participation World and a podcast host for the Running Industry Alliance. He is also a regular volunteer at Parkrun, having completed over 500 Parkruns!

Tom’s experience in the industry offers him a unique macro perspective of the market. From deep insights developed over two decades, he has identified incredible opportunities for how to take the industry to the next level. A truly inspirational, uplifting and thought-provoking discussion, which I truly enjoyed.

Alexander Tanti: Why don’t we start by maybe giving me a little bit of background in terms of your career in the events space?

Tom Kerry: Thank you very much for having me, and looking forward to our discussion. I’m coming up for 25 years in the mass participation and event space. It wasn’t a desire of mine that this was the Holy Grail coming out of university that I wanted to be working in mass participation. So I sort of fell into it on the back of playing a lot of sports myself throughout my life. So once I finished university, it was, “My God, what do I do?”. Now, I had to go and find a job, always knowing that I wanted to work in the sports world. I consider myself lucky to have found a great opportunity to get me started.

I suppose my early stages had to do with a lot of local authority sports development, which led me to manage a number of teams that entered into an event called the London Youth Games, which is effectively a multisport competition for young people representing different London Boroughs. I managed several teams that represented my local borough, which introduced me to that event, and I soon noticed a job opening for that event itself. It gave me a place to do what I wanted to do and to be employed by what is now Limelight Sports because Limelight had the contract to deliver the London Youth Games at that point.

That was back in 1999, which, whenever I say it out loud, always sounds like so long ago, but that was when I first started working as an event organiser within participation sports. After that, the company started being involved with some of the bigger mass participation running events at the time, and in the early stages, we started working with Nike. I was very lucky in my early career to work on all the Run London Nike events, a lot of 10ks and 5ks. That gave me a real taste of where I wanted to work, which was particularly in running but also in other sports disciplines. We have cycling, triathlons and so forth, but particularly running, and that’s really where I forged my career.

I’ve been at Limelight for a very long time; I’ve changed many roles throughout the years, and now I also have a role with Race Nation, representing and building partnerships with them, which really came out of a voluntary role that I have as a director of the Community Interest Company that started and continues to operate the Ealing Half Marathon, which is going to take place on the 24th of September and will be our 11th year of involvement.

All those different roles and experiences have allowed me to get involved with external industry groups and organisations. So, I currently chair the Mass Sports Organisers Group, which is a group of 10 to 12 of the major UK-based companies that put on mass participation running events. So alongside Limelight, you have the London Marathon, Great Run, parkrun, London Landmarks, Human Race, Threshold, etc

Apart from chairing that organisation, I’ve been involved with the Running Industry Alliance since it was set up and a number of other networks as well, including Mass Participation World, which is a global network of event organisers. All in all, I have a pretty broad experience across the industry now, but I think being involved with such a variety of organisations is great and allows me to learn and expand my knowledge and get stuck into some meaty stuff outside of my day role.

I think that one of the big themes I am really excited about for the industry now is how partnerships, collaborations and organisations are coming together, and I think in the last two or three years, this has really developed. While organisations can still be quite tight-knit in their own thinking and quite protective over their IP, people are actually far more open to finding ways to work together and integrate their technologies. That is a big part of what Racecheck has done well, isn’t it? So, that is what I find exciting, and that’s where I think the future and the success of the industry will come from. Actually, I think particularly with participation running, we’re only just scratching the surface at the moment of what we can do. And we’ve obviously got some relatively big numbers, but we’re still only touching a small percentage of the population. And I think by finding ways to collaborate, we’ll grow the audience and bring new people into our world and our industry, and I find that quite exciting.

Alexander Tanti: Absolutely, and I think the longevity of your career, specifically within a specific organisation, just speaks volumes to the kind of passion that you have for the industry. It also underscores how important it is to be consistent to be successful, and jumping from place to place can sometimes have a short-term benefit but longer term, I think you just do not allow yourself to build the kind of foundations required to be able to understand the industry from a much broader perspective as you do now.

Tom Kerry: Yeah, it’s a really fair point. I think it’s a conundrum I’ve often thought about myself in that there’s got to be a place in the industry for experience. And being around the block a few times, I also think it’s really important that we don’t become robots, and we’re really open to fresh ideas and fresh thinking and people coming into our industry from other industries and challenging some of the accepted ways. Particularly in how we connect with new audiences and how the world develops, we must make sure that the old guys, like me, being around a long time, don’t sit there and say, no, that’s wrong. This is how we do it.

We must make sure that we’re encouraging new thinking and so forth, but then again, experience teaches you a lot. And, I often think you learn a lot from when things go wrong, and I’ve certainly been in that situation over time, and it’s difficult, but you find ways through it, and that teaches you stuff for the future.

Longevity also creates opportunity. I’ve been very lucky that people have approached me to propose I get involved in various things, and whether or not that’s paid work or voluntary work, I still get the buzz from doing that. I find that there’s so much that can overlap or a conversation that leads to a direction that you wouldn’t expect to and suddenly finding ways of connecting other organisations together, and ultimately everyone benefits. That is very stimulating, and that’s why I’m still around. I still get a massive buzz from being around a big group of people coming together and wanting to take on a challenge, and when you see people running our events, I still love that. And I love taking part myself, and I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. I’m most fortunate that the industry’s given me a career, and I’ve enjoyed every minute of it.

Alexander Tanti: You mentioned at the start that early on in your career, you were involved with the London Nike 5 and 10ks and decided that this is what you wanted to do with your future. What was it about being involved in these events that made you feel that way?

Tom Kerry: I think a lot of my sporting involvement until that time had been in teams and community sports. One of the things that I really quickly noticed was that the mass participation world and events of that large calibre were attracting huge amounts of different people, offering them the opportunity to take part in something unique. They were achieving their own individual goals within a collective of people. And that really resonated with me, in that the sporting world is far bigger than just someone wanting to win something, which I suppose had been my life until then.

I also loved the fact that you could put on a participation event for a whole range of different reasons. From being a marketing tool for brands and people raising money for charity to bringing people together from different communities and connecting people from different walks of life. Witnessing when people achieve something, the sort of happiness factor and people feeling better about what they did, and the sense of purpose it gave people, I just found that really amazing.

Taking part in a challenging event can be incredibly rewarding on lots of levels. Different companies, brands, charities, and anyone who gets involved can all find an angle that works for them as well. What events have in common is that they’re so multifaceted, and there’s always new stuff that you’re doing and new angles and new reasons why someone’s involved. The ever-evolving nature of it makes it exciting as well. So that was quite a long-winded way of saying that I still get a massive buzz from it. We’re making a difference to someone, and that gets me out of bed, really.

Alexander Tanti: There’s a clear distinction between the nature of team sport and individual sport in that team sport, by default, has its own community. It’s already a collective by its nature, with four, five or 11 people working together. On the other hand, in individual sports, like running, for example, you run on your own. Obviously, there are people around you, but you have your own individual goals and your own personal finish time. The irony is that, and I don’t know whether you agree, the degree to which an organisation is successful, or a race is successful is in its capacity and ability to create a community feel given the constraint of the sport itself. Being a very individual sport, how have you found in the past that organisations have managed to cultivate a community feel within their participants?

Tom Kerry: Yeah, it’s a great point, and I would 100% agree that effectively when you’re signing up for a mass participation event, when it’s thousands of people there, you suddenly become a community of people that are doing something. I think that the challenge for the organiser is to make the person who has signed up feel like they’re part of a bigger community but also give them the individual experience. I suppose, going back to what I said earlier, I started in 1999. The thing that’s changed and revolutionised and allowed us to connect people more is technology. Technology is through everything that we do in our lives. How many people do you see walking around without a phone in their hand? When people start engaging with a mass participation event, they’ll probably do it through their smartphone in the first instance, or they’ll do it through word of mouth, but then they’ll still look it up online. So, while I appreciate there are so many platforms now, organisers must still engage with them to make people feel part of that community before, during and after the gun goes off.

Now, connections can happen throughout everything you do at any time, and within a 10,000-person race, there are so many opportunities for connections, whether it’s speaking to the person next to you or through a Strava connection by being part of the same event. It might be on Instagram or TikTok or even online reviews where people can make connections and then say, I saw you at this event. Are you going to this event? And it’s the best marketing tool that we’ve ever had when people share photos and share reviews. Organisers helping facilitate these connections can and must make participants feel like they’re part of a team who are all in it to accomplish something special, regardless of people’s ability.

Alexander Tanti: So, from a practical point of view, have you found any strategies organisers could use to effectively keep in touch or cultivate this feeling of community within their participants?

Tom Kerry: Yeah. It’s a balance again, isn’t it? Because we all get so many interactions from different businesses and organisations, asking and encouraging us to sign up for something. So you have to find a balance. What I really like is finding organisations you can work with throughout the year that can offer your participants who have entered into one of your events another experience that will lead towards it. So whether or not that’s a shoe trial or, coming along to a training event or doing something that’s different, it helps them continue to engage with you as a brand and helps them feel ready for what they’re ultimately taking on, but it doesn’t feel forced like “You must do this”, and it’s finding the right partners who can do that. It doesn’t always have to be something physical; it can be words of encouragement, daily mindfulness and goal visualisation, a check-in or anything related to the event that is coming up. Engaging with some of the smaller partnerships well ahead of the event can work really well because, on event day, they might get lost when there’s this whole collage of different brands and messages. If you can do a smaller, more intimate experience with people six months out, then that’s providing real value and allowing a partnership’s full value to emerge, as well as maintaining a sense of community for the event and organiser without appearing sales-y or forced. And those are the things that I’m looking at now. How do we enable those touch points through a participant’s journey that attract more partners because they feel part of the big, high-profile event, but they’re all so able to speak to their audiences the way they want to and be more intimate with them?

Alexander Tanti: Touching on collaborations and partnerships. If a small organiser was putting on a couple of local events looking to grow their business further, how do you think they could leverage that power of collaboration and partnership to either grow their existing events or grow their business in general?

Tom Kerry: yeah, I think this is something that The Running Industry Alliance has done pretty well recently. it seems silly that we’re saying this, but this is the first time that all the verticals within the running industry, from retail and brands through to events and charities and government bodies and different services that provide the industry, have all come together. We are now finally having those conversations, which opens up new opportunities to think about and understand what people want and how they want to connect with their customers. I love that there has been a real growth of online training and coaching apps at the moment that’s working really well. Lots of people use those, but they want an end goal. So, of course, it’s natural for a partnership between an event and a training app, as they can give you a training plan for a specific event. It’s a lot more intimate and individualised than, say, downloading a generic half-marathon training plan.

And there are retail brands now that say that we shouldn’t just be buying new kit all the time. We should be very cognizant of sustainability and engage with people when they really need it. That might not always be a finisher’s T-shirt, but it might be some training gear that you can use for the next six to twelve months to help you get ready for a specific event. This can create a level of partnership between events and brands that go beyond just a sponsor deal.

I think that the word partnership is definitely right, and I think big events have been a bit guilty in the past of saying that we bring this big audience and this big database, so you should be part of what we do, the way we do it. Partnerships should involve much more thinking about the participant’s day-to-day and how to tailor the experience, of which the event is just one part-really thinking about the person who is taking part, their build-up, their preparation challenges, both physical and mental. Doing that and engaging the right partnerships at the right time in the journey will make the person who’s ultimately taking part in the event feel much more special than they’ve ever been in the past.

Alexander Tanti: I suspect the challenge here is that this requires a lot more long-term strategic thinking rather than the short-term, commercial relationship or pursuing a simple sponsorship relationship. Have you found implementing that to be a little challenging when many smaller events need cash upfront and quickly and don’t have time to think of all this?

Tom Kerry: Yeah, that sounds sensible, of course. As in every other industry out there, event organisers have also been through a bloody hard time in the last few years. Cash is king, and the big closed-road events are not cheap to put on; they’re expensive. But if we don’t grow the industry as a whole, then everyone will suffer. So I strongly believe you have to look at it long term. We’re still only touching a small percentage of the population, so there’s a whole world of people out there who are not coming. Is it because, actually, all we have tried to do over the years is sell a ticket to an event when we should be thinking more about getting them on board in the industry and giving them experiences that are far bigger than just one day? And I firmly believe that. The only way we do that, we’ve got to take people on a journey.

We’ve helped people try a running event, and it’s brilliant; it makes you feel healthy. You get all the endorphins, and you get a lovely medal at the end, but of course, that’s not enough to get people involved long-term. So you’ve got to think of a way to say, how do I get you to be more active? Here are where the partnerships can make a huge difference. Once you’re on that journey, it might take you two years before signing up for a 10K, half marathon or a marathon. Through the partnerships, you can get someone active, whether that’s a weekly walk around the block or something more. The point is to keep them active to the point where they’re going, “I’m ready for a challenge. Who are the people who have helped me on this journey? Who are the partners that have helped my journey and made it easier for me?” If, as an event organiser, we’re connected to those partners from an early stage, then, of course, they will help push those people when they’re ready to come to our events. So, yes, you have to think long-term or strategically to attract new people in the first place.

Alexander Tanti: So not just organisers pushing people to brands once someone has committed to an event, but also brands and organisations pushing people who have been progressively more active to their first event. I absolutely agree that what the Running Industry Alliance is doing is amazing because it’s creating that ecosystem and platform where these conversations can be made and for all those different stakeholders in our industry to interact and support each other in their own journeys. Do you think there’s an opportunity for partnership collaboration between event organisers themselves? Who may traditionally have seen each other as competitors, let’s say.

Tom Kerry: Absolutely 100%. I’ve had these conversations over time with Limelight and other organisations. To say for instance, we organise a 10K and a half marathon, but we don’t organise a marathon. So, finding an organisation to collaborate with and take somebody on a journey from, let’s say, a parkrun to a 10K that you will enter with Limelight. But after two years, you might think about doing a marathon. Why lose a participant at that point in their journey? We don’t have to create something new for them, but we can connect them to the right partner, whether that’s someone organising marathons or an Ultramarathon, etc. By organisers taking a long-term view of their customers, they can look for complementary events that could cover a gap in their offering and become more comfortable with cross-promotion.

The participant base in the marketplace is big enough. We’re just scratching the surface, so we can all benefit from encouraging more people to be more active. But I really firmly believe it starts from people finding something close to their home that feels like a group of people that are at the same stage in their journey as they are and that they can connect with very locally. Part of our challenge as organisers is to work out how we then connect with the igniters of that activity at a hyper-local level and help them bring those people to next-level activity types. That’s absolutely the way to go, and technology allows us to do that easily. And we can find commercial agreements between us that work and make it easy for the person who wants to engage with us as organisers to do that.

Alexander Tanti: What you’re talking about is in terms of cross-promotion and connection of events. It’s very different to the cynical view of consolidation, where bigger players just absorb the smaller events. Smaller operators may be hesitant to reach out to the larger ones as they feel there are other motives or objectives in mind. I don’t know how you could potentially convince them not to be afraid to reach out. That’s an interesting one.

Tom Kerry: Everyone, when they put on an event, is trying to give people a good experience, and that can manifest itself in a huge amount of different ways. The big closed-road gigantic, high-profile events are a different experience to the local organiser who does something which is based around a local community taking part, but it can still be a great experience, and that’s something that I learned. It was fantastic for me once I did get involved with the Ealing Half Marathon because, yes, it’s closed roads, but it’s a community event with a far smaller budget and far fewer resources. It doesn’t mean you can’t give the people participating a great experience. What I would say to event organisers who are often incredibly proud of what they’re achieving but underselling what they’re achieving and don’t always see the full value of what they’re doing is this. There are great partnerships and opportunities to be formed from which everyone can benefit. Limelight organised the Hackney Half Marathon. We had 24,000 people last year, but those 24,000 people have got to come from somewhere. Now, they’ve gone on a journey to get to a half-marathon. People don’t just wake up saying, I’m going to run a half marathon tomorrow.

We are very open to working with other events, and we’re looking for people who care about their customers and their participants, the consumers. Working together to enhance and complement our customer journeys benefits everyone. Why wouldn’t we want to do that? It would be a missed opportunity that does not help the industry grow; rather, it chokes it.

Alexander Tanti: Throughout your career, you probably worked with events of all sizes and sports types. What is, in your experience, the common denominator for an event that offers a great experience to its participants?

Tom Kerry: I think, as an organiser, It’s easy to make decisions based on your own assumptions. But one of the biggest things I’ve said to people is always look at it from the participant’s point of view. What is the journey that they will do, and how are we making that experience seamlessly enjoyable through the touch points we offer? And always think of it from their point of view, not us as organisers. Now, of course, we apply our knowledge and experience to that, but first put ourselves in their shoes. We must know what they want and the things that make a difference to them when someone has had a thought in the middle of the night that they’re going to run a 10K, or you watch a marathon on TV and think, “I want to do that”. How do we then help them on that journey, and what are the barriers stopping them? And then what do they do after they cross the finish line? They go. “I’ve had a great time.” And we then want them to say, “How do I keep doing more?”

And so, I think that’s the biggest single factor for me, it’s for an organiser not to stereotype, and to go into the shoes of their participants and work out how to make that journey as enjoyable as possible because we compete with all the other experiences that people can do with their disposable income. We’re competing against different experiences, such as going to festivals, but it can be “I’m going on holiday” or “I’m going to the cinema” or whatever. So we are competing for people to spend money with us. And so we’ve got to make them come away thinking, “Wow, I’ve had a great experience”. We’ve got to think about what we’re doing. That means thinking through the entire customer journey. So, the common denominator for me is when the organiser is constantly thinking in terms of the participant.

Alexander Tanti: And I guess shifting your perspective in that way creates mindblowing opportunities. We’ve got this term in technology product development called “Jobs To Be Done”, and you follow the participant’s journey from the minute they wake up until the minute they go to bed daily and find all these different things that they’re doing, such as what they’re eating to what kind of chair they are using to all the gear they’re using within the context of preparing for the event. Stuff like “Okay, I need a gym to support my training”, and then “What kind of mattress am I using to support my fitness?” and all these different things the participants go through daily that support them towards that goal. All these create opportunities for partnerships and collaborations, and it’s actually mind-blowing if you think about it that way; it’s really exciting.

Tom Kerry: Yeah, there’s opportunity everywhere, and we shouldn’t be afraid to try different things. And some of them won’t work, but we should not be afraid to try them in the first place. And yeah, we want to give people a good time. We want them to enjoy it. Our best marketers here are the people who have taken part before because of all the technology in the world that we have; word of mouth is still probably the best sales tool out there, so let’s make sure they have a good time, and they tell people about it.

Alexander Tanti: That’s a very strong and concise message. I think that organisers can start thinking outside the box beyond just sponsorships and for broader collaborations and partnerships. Again, the Running Industry Alliance is an incredible resource to get started and then get plugged in within that ecosystem. But I wanted to ask a more personal question about your career. So far, are there any highlights that are very close to your heart, things you have achieved that really made an impact and are still carved in your mind?

Tom Kerry: I’ve been asked it before. It’s so hard to pinpoint one particular thing, but it’s probably the big events that I have worked on. There are a few that stand out, but sometimes I find I’m saying something, and then I’ll think of something else, I suppose The Run London campaigns had such a big impact on me early on. Some people may remember the North versus South 10K. That was just so clever as a concept. It really engaged an audience.

Alexander Tanti: What was it about the concept that made it special?

Tom Kerry: People from London have always been proud of being from London, but then some say I’m north of the river or south of the river. The concept was so clever in creating that rivalry and then putting both tribes in different coloured T-shirts. Visually it was brilliant; it opened up so many ways of connecting with an audience. It was a talking point across the industry, and it hadn’t really been done yet. It was still just a 10K, but it was the marketing side of things that was just so clever. I thought that was brilliant.

Tom Kerry: The Royal Parks Half marathon was another one. That was the first closed-road half marathon in London. But I am equally proud of being involved with Ealing Half Marathon. That’s something that’s in my local community that I’ve seen has had a huge impact on people, and it’s been such a positive thing. So many of us feel ownership of it because it’s on our doorstep and just a highlight of the year, and I feel as equally proud as I do in anything else I’ve been involved with. I’ve worked with several races in different countries outside the UK, which have been incredibly memorable because you learn so much by doing stuff in different territories, and I’ve been incredibly lucky to have had such a variety of experiences. It’s so hard to pinpoint one highlight as there have been so many.

Alexander Tanti: Would you consider Covid as the biggest challenge in your career so far?

Tom Kerry: There have been challenges, but when the industry is shut down, and you can’t do anything, and Limelight is an employer of 50, 60 people, not knowing when you can start again… And then the whole industry supports a whole range of supply networks, and you just sit there and think this is people’s lives… Of course, you get why you can’t do it, but the impact of not doing something, the knock-on effects on so many people. That was a lot of sleepless nights…

Alexander Tanti: I think that all your experiences have given you a much broader perspective of the industry. I’d be very interested to hear what you think might be the biggest threat to the industry right now.

Tom Kerry: I think I mostly like to think of opportunities and what could bring us together. But yeah, there are threats, and perhaps right now, the biggest thing is that everything’s becoming more expensive. So we’re competing for people’s spend. I also think that getting people active and how we play a role in that is becoming harder. It’s getting harder for people to live an active life. If you look at the younger generations, it seems like it’s getting harder for each generation to be as active as the previous one, and if you’re not active, you’re not entering an event, are you? So that’s a big challenge for us. There are a few threats out there, some of which are out of our control, so we’ve got to recognise that, but then it should challenge us to find solutions and see that as an opportunity. But I would be naive to think that everything’s rosy.

Alexander Tanti: This has been incredibly insightful, and I think this topic of broader partnerships between different parties within the same industry is something that hasn’t really been touched before, nor do I think that it’s in the forefront of people’s minds. It’s imperative that people become more aware of the opportunities that are potentially lying within partnerships, so I’m very, very excited to share this conversation with the broader community.

Again, thank you so much for taking some of your valuable time to share your stories, insights and learnings from such a long and diverse career in the industry.

Originally published at https://racecheck.substack.com.

A conversation with Tom Kerry was originally published in Racecheck on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Alexander Tanti: Thanks for joining me today! Let’s talk a bit about the background of how BigFeat events came about and what is your big why?

Chris: I think when the COVID pandemic hit the UK, we were still allowed to go outside and do our exercise, so Claire and I started going out on bike rides and doing some runs. We’re very lucky to live on the south coast of England. We live very close to the New Forest National Park, which is an enormous area of parkland. So, we were running in there, thinking, “Wow, some of these routes are so nice here. I wonder if there’s an opportunity to show other people some of these routes we’re finding.” That’s kind of how the seeds were planted. We started going over Ordnance Survey maps and started looking into mapping out bits and pieces. As soon as we had a route, we began to look into how to get permission to do certain things and started contacting the right authorities. Obviously, we were still in lockdown, so we couldn’t do anything immediately. So we basically just created a bunch of maps and routes to begin with.

Claire: I think I really just love looking at maps and making up routes. We avoid out-and-backs, we avoid multiple loops, and we try to make them a bit more technical and difficult. So, we’re always turning off the trail and going a different way, and if we don’t know where a path goes, reccing can take forever. We always go up at first, just in case it might be nicer. And then we end up just constantly tweaking the routes. They’re very unique, I think.

Chris: People have said that what we do is trail runs by trail runners. We’ve heard that statement quite a lot of times, you know, so we just pick the routes that we would like to run and showcase parts of places that people have never been to before, and that’s kind of how the idea was born. We both belong to a running club, so we were used to running with other people. And then it was just kind of a waiting game through COVID until we could get around to doing our first event.

Claire: We managed to get our first-ever event on the trails around Winchester, and because it didn’t go through Forestry England or any national trust, we did manage to get one on by setting them off in groups of six and with COVID restrictions in place. I think that was a really good thing in the end because there wasn’t much going on at that point. And because we both had full-time jobs, there was no risk. That’s the only way we managed to do this because if we failed at an event, then it actually didn’t matter.

Alex Tanti: So, obviously from the sounds of it, you both have great skills or unique skills, whether that’s mapping, scouting, creating unique routes, etc. But I’m interested in finding out what it is about that area or those routes that had such a big emotional impact on you that you felt so strongly about sharing it with others. Because obviously, you love running these routes; you might as well just continue running them. What was it that made you want to share them? Was there any particular experience or benefit that you got out of this that you felt you wanted to share with the world?

We wanted other people to feel exactly what we were feeling, whether it’s running a certain trail or seeing a certain view for the first time.

Chris: I think the initial one that we first recorded and put together, there was a mention that I’d spent a lot of time over there in the scouts, and there was one area that I’d always remembered that when the sun rises first thing in the morning, it rises over a lot from the horizon, and you can see right over the National Park. For us, when we do the event now, we start early so people can see this sunrise as they line up to start. I don’t know; it’s quite an emotional sort of time, I suppose. It’s like you’ve got dawn breaking and you’re just about to set off on an adventure, and that has always been an appeal for me, especially. It’s the appeal of getting up early, liking to see the sunrise. It’s a bit corny, but it’s like a new day with new possibilities, isn’t it? To see that sunrise, it doesn’t matter what happened the day before; you’ve got a clean slate if you know what I mean. So that first event we ever conceptualized is based on that experience. It’s a nice feeling now to do that event and see everyone lining up along this bank, watching the sunrise before they start the race. They’ve all got their cameras out; they’re taking photographs. And we stand there, thinking, “That’s exactly what we wanted.” You know, everyone hopefully is feeling a bit of what we felt when we first saw that ourselves. So, being able to share that, that’s it. That’s exactly what we wanted when we started BigFeat. We wanted other people to feel exactly what we were feeling, whether it’s running a certain trail or seeing a certain view for the first time. It’s special. You can’t keep these things to yourself; it’s no fun being thrilled in solitude. Everyone should be able to experience that. That’s what makes it worthwhile.

Alex Tanti: Feel free to be as corny as you like. You know, organizers of these kinds of events are some of the most passionate people I’ve ever met. You guys probably don’t do these events to become millionaires; there’s a big why behind it. And that’s what I’m trying to uncover. And Claire, would you say that it’s a similar motivation from your side as well?

Claire: Yeah, I just think, you know, so many people live in towns and cities. I’ll be driving to work, and there are people running up pavements along the main road. I really want to convert as many of those people to trails as possible because I think once people try trails, they realize the mental health benefits are huge. Many people just don’t have the confidence to go on them, and quite often, trails aren’t far from where you live. By organizing events, we hope some of these people will feel the security of being with others and realize, “Actually, this is how I got that feel-good feeling. This is something I want to do more of.” The mental health benefits of trail running are absolutely huge, and we both get so much from it. We want other people to experience that too. Making our events accessible is really important. We do quite a few things to ensure even beginners can join and enjoy our events. That’s a big plus for us.

Chris: From a personal point of view, I suffered quite a bit with addictions during my 20s and 30s. When I reached 40, six years ago, I managed to leave all that behind and have been good and sober since then. A lot of what helped me during that time was trail running. I started running, started trail running, and then I met Claire, and we ran a lot together, which helped me. Two years into that new journey, having the idea to create events and being able to share some of what I found helped me, as Claire touched on, with mental health, from depression myself, it really helps me. So, if we can give other people an opportunity, without being too overt about it — we don’t really mention too much about our personal struggles — but we let people find their own way into things that are going to help them, you know? And of course, getting feedback at the end of events about how people have maybe had similar struggles or whatever, I tend to keep stuff pretty close to my chest, but it’s quite affirming to hear those stories.

Alex Tanti: Thanks for sharing that. What’s particularly astonishing, and impressive, is managing to go from 1 event in 2020 to 11 in just three years.

Chris: Yes, and there are still places to go, but we really haven’t got the capacity for much more. We’d like to put on a 50-miler and give people a bit of a longer event, but we haven’t got the capacity for much more. I think we’ve got two more events in us. But then the problem is, how can we make it a business? Now that I understand what costs go into organizing an event, I see what good value for money is, and I struggle with some events that look lovely, but then you see the price… So we really want to keep it at a reasonable price point for people, but we also would like to have a marketing budget.

Alex Tanti: Have you found any good tactics to keep the costs down as much as possible, while not really compromising any of the experience?

I’ve got a “WordPress for Dummies” book next to my computer, which is hilarious because I use it to help do stuff on the website. We have no advertising or marketing background, no digital background, so we’re learning how to use social media

Chris: Yeah, we do absolutely everything ourselves. I think just backtracking a little bit, we’ve built up a very close-knit community around our events. We’ve had a lot of return runners, which speaks volumes. The feedback that we get in places like Racecheck, is brilliant because we can actually see it and think, “Right, we’re going to take this feedback and implement it in our next event.” But with us being quite an accessible company, and Claire and I are always around, we’re not fronted by brands, you know, we’re not a faceless entity. So, half of our success, especially on platforms like Racecheck, is because people believe in us as individuals and as a company. They keep coming back, but it’s gotten to the stage where we’re almost victims of our own success. We do everything ourselves, literally. I’ve got a “WordPress for Dummies” book next to my computer, which is hilarious because I use it to help do stuff on the website. We have no advertising or marketing background, no digital background, so we’re learning how to use social media…

Alex Tanti: It’s very impressive because a lot of times, people just hide behind the assumption that these things are difficult, and “I can’t do that unless I have a marketing team or unless I have a website developer or an agency doing all these things for me.” Examples like yours are such a big motivational and inspirational boost and an incentive for others to actually look at what’s possible and really push themselves to go that step further. Cutting costs, yes, cost these days is a big prohibitive factor, but it’s the impression of some special skill or knowledge required to at least start that I really want to try and dispel by using examples like yours to try and get people motivated to at least get started.

Chris: If we can do it, anyone can. If you have an idea, you have to believe in yourself that you can see it through or at least take the first step.

Claire: Yeah, believe in what you’re doing, and the most important thing is that you’ve got a great group, and that’s the first thing. And if you’ve got a great group, even if you only get 50 people in year one, next year, you’ll have 100. Then you’ll have 300. And I think, you know, as long as people feel that they’re supported, and you’ve got marshals out there, you are safe, you know, you will get there, but it’ll take a bit longer. So I think if we’d gone and thrown thousands at marketing, okay, our numbers would have gone off a bit quicker, but at the end of the day, word of mouth is more powerful.

Chris: That first event we organized in the New Forest National Park had 35 people in it the first year we signed up. But now we’re averaging probably 400 people per event. A second-year event that we did in January this year had 500 people. So, to be honest with you, it’s so lovely meeting new people. It’s nice seeing all the return people. You know, we’re friends with those guys now, and we’re making personal Facebook friends with a lot of them. It’s great to see new people every time.

Alex Tanti: Did anything special happen after that event that gave you the motivation and the drive to grow so quickly?

Claire: We just loved it. Like, there were loads of mistakes, like the day before. When I was signing out, I thought I could sign out 50k in a day, and we were both out till 4 am, to be back on site at 5 am. And we were still signing at 4 am, so we literally probably slept for an hour, if that. But we still loved it. We were running around in the middle of the night. And then we had the idea for the Classic Element Trail Series, which was going to be our four events based on the elements — earth, wind, fire, water. So that gave us four, and then straight away, we were like, our New Forest one, being the one that’s inspired by the element air because when you’re up there, you can see the sky. So in our minds, we’ve got the Winchester event, we’ve got another four events here, that’s five. And then it literally just snowballed. We just kept coming up with new event ideas. We’ve got one that uses a ferry, which is very local to us. The runners get on a ferry to go across a stretch of water. It’s just mind-boggling, things like that, that there’s no way you can plan to have an idea to do that. And then you just think, “I wonder if…” and then it sort of happens.

Alex Tanti: It’s so cool, you know because you’ve got these fairly traditional road events that just go around a loop where things tend to be fairly fixed which by default shift the participant’s focus on performance and just getting to the end, rather than experience. It just comes to show that, you can use creativity when it comes to organizing events and I think that’s probably what makes a lot of your events stand out.

Chris: We go the extra mile, and we make life very hard for ourselves in comparison to other similar-sized event companies. They might use, as Claire touched on earlier, out-and-backs or multi-loop. So, say like two half-marathon loops to make up their marathon, whereas we feel like we work very, very hard to put on our events and to find those routes, but then people like that. They like that when they start, they’re going on a journey for X amount of miles and coming to a finishing point rather than being passed here again or now running back the other way. It’s very easy to pick an established way, like the South Downs Way or something, and go run 50 miles from this point to this point, and you don’t even have to go out and recce, really.

Claire: We’ve found that in our area, especially where we are in the UK, there’s probably another two or three quite established events companies that seem to have a lot of brand-backing behind them, and you go on social media, and you see video adverts for their events all the time, and we’re texting each other saying, “Look at this, this is brilliant,” but also with a tinge of like, “Ah, how do we make that next step?” You know, to get like a little bit of sponsorship because we still don’t want to lose the roots and the grassroots aspect of our events, but to be able to showcase what we do to as many people as we want to.

Alex Tanti: But I think you guys are definitely going about it the right way. Understanding what creates a great experience for people and then slowly, incrementally increasing the capacity, rather than going from the perspective of, “Okay. I want to quit my job tomorrow. How can I make that happen?” and then trying to figure out what it is that people like because that usually fails.

Chris: It was very low risk, really, like we didn’t borrow any money for anything. So, we hired an arch for our first few events, you know, and then we bought our own arch. We used to hire, and borrow barriers, and after every event, we just reinvested whatever we made.

Claire: We’d say to anybody who wants to put on an event. You can be like, “We need this. We need this. We need this,” but you don’t need that much. You can hire a finishing arch, you can hire a start line team, advertising flags, you know. It can be cute to put a table for some food underneath it. You see a lot of these big companies, you think, “How are we ever going to get there?”

Alex Tanti: Yeah, I think it might be a little bit because of Claire’s success as a triathlete, and you know, having that “get on with it” mentality. My question is, do you see a lot of your participants feeling sort of fed up with more established running events or road events and looking for more of a unique experience? And do you feel that this might be an overall industry trend that is going that way?

Chris: There are a lot of people who have never run a trail event before. They are probably 10k runners, half marathon runners, or road runners, and now they’ve done a whole year of trail running, and that’s it. They’ve moved away; they like being outside in nature, getting muddy, just being away from the hustle and bustle of town or cars driving past.

As long as they’ve got nice aid stations and they’re supported by marshals, they just want to be out on trails where there aren’t huge packs where you can’t get past anyone, or you have to queue for 20 minutes to get over a stile.

Claire: A lot of people don’t actually want the razzmatazz. The people that we get are just genuine, down-to-earth people. They don’t need to be in a crowd with thousands of others, with a loudspeaker and music blaring. As long as they’ve got nice aid stations and they’re supported by marshals, they just want to be out on trails where there aren’t huge packs where you can’t get past anyone, or you have to queue for 20 minutes to get over a stile. And then these people are charging 80 quid for them, and you think, “What kind of experience are they getting?” If we have a situation like that, we limit our numbers because we don’t want anyone to have a bad experience. So we’re not greedy; if we know our routes are narrow near the stiles, we adapt to make sure the runners again have a good experience.

Chris: Claire and I are also at the finish line, handing out the medals. Give them a handshake, pat on the back, listening to their story from the run. How they felt, the ups and downs they’ve been through. I think the fact that people wait, and they’ve said this to us, they can do another event, and there’s just someone there handing out medals and maybe they get ushered through the finish line area quite quickly. Another reason that they like us and keep coming back is because they know that it’s Claire and me at BigFeat Events. That’s it, there’s no one else. We have people that help us at events, but if they have a story to tell about their experience on the trails, they can come and tell it to the people who made that route, directly. They can say, “Oh, I really enjoyed the view when I got to this bit,” or wherever they were on the course, and I think they just love that. We’ve got a Facebook page for our BigFeat community, which is just shy of 4,000 people on it now, and they have little conversations on there amongst themselves. People find each other because they’ve been running with a certain person through the events. They’re connecting, making new friendships as well. It’s great to stand back and watch it, but the feedback that we generally get, especially when we look at the Racecheck reviews as well, is the term ‘low-key’ comes up a lot. We try and be as professional as the big boys, yeah, but on a low-key scale. So, people know if they’ve got a problem or if they’ve got a suggestion or something they particularly liked well, they know that they can feed it directly back to the people that are running the show, basically, rather than going through intermediaries and somehow getting back to the guy that owns the event company who may not even be at the event.

Alex Tanti: But then I guess, if you do ever want to transition from a part-time to a full-time occupation with this, at some point do you think that might jeopardize the low-key niche that you’ve built to get to that volume or capacity required to justify doing this full-time?

Claire: We did one or two big-ticket events. So, one or two events where actually we can fit more than 200 cars in the car park, and, you know, we could put loads of different distances on but still give a really good experience. There are usually restrictions on how many cars we can park, and that’s the barrier. And if we’ve got two more events we can potentially put on that have no limits, then that might just tick the financial box. But we still want to keep all the other ones, and we would be gutted if we felt we’d lost that vibe because people say it’s a really friendly vibe and it is.

Chris: We would never want to lose that low-key aspect of things. As I said, we’ve got half a dozen events that can’t really get any bigger because of whether it’s car parking or because it’s National Trust permissions or Forestry permissions. So that’s cool with us, we can have our 350 people and keep that sort of vibe. But if we can just have the other half a dozen to be the ones that enable us to take our foot off the gas maybe and make BigFeat more of a full-time thing, that would allow us a better work-life balance and to be channelling everything we can into making the events better. We’re currently hovering between two jobs or two different lives which can dilute what you can give to both. Of course, if you take your foot off the gas in one aspect of your life then you’ve got more energy to make something much better.

Alex Tanti: I wanted to ask, going from 35 participants in your first event in the first year to over 300, almost 400, what were the big learnings from that transition that allowed you still as a two-person team to go from such a small capacity to 10x that capacity?

Chris: We’ve learned a lot, and we still make mistakes, and as long as we learn from those mistakes, we don’t mind. But whether it’s 35 people or 350 people, as long as you’re doing the same things in the right way, it doesn’t really matter. Do we say things like, “Oh, so when we have 35 people, we’ll have two portaloos; if it’s 350 people, you’re ordering seven or eight.” It’s just scaling it. If you’ve got set ways of doing something in your business, so that when you actually go through those processes, it doesn’t matter how many people are involved, it’s essentially the same.

Claire: We had six aid stations for the 35 people. Because the distances were so long, we still had to use them. So nothing was different. We didn’t take change the aid stations, we still put up the arches, and have big gazebos like we usually do. We did nothing different. So, it was the same quality as if we’d had hundreds of people.

Starting the right way is key. We don’t cut corners because there are only a few people. So, when things have scaled up, it’s been quite a natural process, and we haven’t really been overwhelmed by the fact that there are 500 people or 600 people.

Chris: Starting the right way is key. We don’t cut corners because there are only a few people. So, when things have scaled up, it’s been quite a natural process, and we haven’t really been overwhelmed by the fact that there are 500 people or 600 people. You may need more porta-loos or more admin, emails, and questions, and getting things ready for the chip timing, but that’s mostly paperwork. Claire’s very well organized, and I’m ridiculously thorough about how I like things to be done. So somehow, we haven’t killed each other yet.

Alex Tanti: Perhaps you can speak a little bit to what you think are the key ingredients for making it work when you work so closely together as a couple.

Claire: As a teacher, I’m in charge of Excel spreadsheets. And also one day i’ll just dedicate to admin. So, I sit at my desk all day, and do all of the permissions, and spreadsheets, and answer all the emails. I do that side of things whereas Chris is the creative one. So, he designs the medals, he does marketing adverts, and then he also has the vision of how the event is set up on the day. So, I totally leave him to that, but I do all the marshal planning, so I know where every single marshal is, and at what time they’re there, and if anything goes wrong on the course, I straightaway know what can be done about that. And whereas Chris will be at the finish, and he’ll be there making sure that everything is set up correctly

Chris: First, you’re both trying to do absolutely everything. And then you realize that doesn’t work. You know, you can’t both be trying to do everything because then you end up not doing anything properly. So, getting our roles defined, especially because we’ve got a team of maybe four to six people that will come and do every event with us as paid volunteers, they know our ways and our protocols and how we go about things. That’s freed us up a bit more time. It’s crucial to split these roles up sometimes; we can’t both be race directors, you know. So, it’s better for Claire to do the race director role. She does the safety briefings. She has a very, very good knowledge of where everyone is on the course regarding marshals, volunteers or aid stations. That allows me to step away and sort out issues, which happens quite a lot.

Claire: Chris is always there at the finish line, making sure that when they finish, there’s that face. He’s very good at remembering names. So, “Oh, hello John. You did our event last year,” is perfect for him. And now we’re kind of dipping out of helping him on the finish line but also stepping back and just sorting out anything that’s happening elsewhere.

Chris: As we naturally grow and get bigger, it’s like we’re too big for just the two of us but too small to take on any full-time employees. In my head, especially, I look at it in terms of where we will be in 2025, 2026? I’d want a course manager, someone who’s responsible for just sorting out all the signage the day before, responsible for anything that’s going out on the course. We already utilize one of our paid volunteers as an aid station manager. He’s got a van; he’ll be driving around checking that the stations are delivered properly, they’re set up right if they need anything he can get to them to give more water or whatever. So slowly but surely, we’re taking other parts of the job that would always be up to Claire and me and being able to delegate them to someone else. That’s one of the biggest changes, really, from the beginning, is that at the start, we couldn’t pay anybody else anything. So, they were all these people who would come on the day, volunteer, get a free place in an event, or friends and family just doing favours for us. Having different sets of people for every single event who had never done anything before and managing all that was really difficult. In contrast, now we pay probably at least four people. And we’ve got a team of about six people, and between four and six of them will work every event. They all know what they’re doing and even if you put them on a horrible job you can say, “Oh, it’s that horrible road crossing, but you’ve got six hours. Can you do just three hours here?” It’s made life so much easier having the team take care of small tasks. The step up from that would be somebody totally taking over an area, like in charge of marshal plans. It’s quite hard letting go, because I know how much work has taken to know all this stuff. Even signing the course, I mean, I see organizers casually saying, “Oh, can anyone help sign the course?” It’s difficult; we don’t let anyone sign; there’s a way we want it done, and because the course is complex, there are certain things about signing to ensure that people won’t go the wrong way. How many places do you sign, how many confidence markers, and how tight the arrows are. Anyone doing it we’d almost have to have them do signing training.

Alex Tanti: And when it comes to volunteers, whether paid or unpaid, you still rely on people with the reputation of your events. How do you go about choosing the right people?

Claire: It’s a lot easier now because they’re all from our community. Whereas before, I was getting my son’s friends. I was like, “Look, I’ll give you 20 quid if you come and stand on this drop-off thing,” We offer a free event place now to some volunteers. We find a lot of people within the community, and it could be something as simple as the event that we’re running this Sunday, for example. There’s a 16-mile option on the courses, so they may come along and help out in the car park in the morning, then they get their free place to go and run the event, or they might do the 16-mile and then at the end, after they finish, they might put on a high-vis and help me give out medals or, you know, just be a general another person who can help out at the finish line. And they want to be involved. We’ve got a girl who’s emailed us saying, “I’m really not feeling too good, so probably don’t want to run the event, but can I come along anyway, just to help out?” They love the vibe and the community feel of being part of it, so I’m not going to lie, finding volunteers is still probably our number one challenge.

Chris: It’s the most time-consuming thing. But now, if we’re short and we put a call out on our community page, saying, “We’re short, can anyone help?” we always get yeses. And so, we’re always on the day thinking we could do with two or three more, but…

Claire: The great thing about having volunteers from our running community, is they know the kinds of things they’d want the marshals to say to them as they were coming up to a road crossing or something. So, we trust them and their knowledge. It’d be different if it’s someone who’s never run any type of event before to volunteer as a marshal because they have yet to get the experience of an event.

Alex Tanti: And you literally would email the entire community with a request?

Claire: No, we don’t do that. We just put it on our Facebook community page. The only one we really need help with now is we’ve got two events in Manchester. A big Christmas event and we have one in Lyme Park. For that one you don’t need as many marshals as we can normally manage that with friends and family. But the Christmas one, we’ve been very close to having to go to a company and pay people to do it because we just haven’t got the community base there yet.

Chris: It’s difficult because I’ve seen events before where they’ve quite clearly paid a random company, and people just sit there on their phones; we wouldn’t want that. Their hearts are not into it. They’re just there, and I think that’s not the point of having a marshal. They need to understand what the runners are going through.

Alex Tanti: Yeah, even as a participant, it really sucks when you see people obviously not caring.

Claire: Yeah, and as a new event organizer, doing the marshal plan is the hardest bit because you have to work out the fastest runner, slowest runner, every single marshal point, timings etc. There’s so much information that we use at each marshal point so they’re at the right place at the right time, and then we always have to do a separate one for parking. But once you’ve done that for year one, year two, you’re just then filling in the names. You’ve got the timings, you’ve got the slots, you’ve got everything else sorted.

Chris: It gets easier. We were saying earlier on that if you do everything right initially, then when you scale it up year on year, it’s not too massive of a job because you’ve done things properly the first time around. It’s short-term pain for long-term gain. It might take a little bit of time to do it initially.

Claire: The numbers are pretty much set whether you’ve got 10 people or 1000. It is a lot easier when there are more people because the marshalls are busier.

Alex Tanti: So, you’ve got a dedicated Facebook group for your community, which is, I guess, separate from your event Facebook pages. Would you offer a free entry to anybody willing to volunteer, or anything else as well on top of that? Have you found any tips and tricks that tend to work really well?

Chris: Generally, the free event entry works nicely. The fact that we offer quite a few events now, up to almost 15 for this year, that’s quite a lot of money if people want to enter all of those events. So, we say to people, volunteer at a couple of events, then that will pay for another two events if you want to do them.

Claire: I think the other thing I try to do is to make their marshalling experience as positive as possible. So, if we have a coffee van, there’s always a marshal tab. If we have pizza, there’s a marshal tab so they can get food, they can get a hot drink. And then also, you don’t stick someone on a road crossing for five hours. Personally, I’d instead do an hour and a half into the race, you know, then have a chance to perhaps go to the toilet in between, grab a coffee, and then actually be somewhere all on my own for a long period of time. And once you’ve got your returning volunteers, you know they can handle that, and they don’t mind doing that. But when someone volunteers for the first time, I always put them on something quite nice. So, there’ll be an aid station, or they’ll only be doing two-hour stints. So, first-time volunteer, especially if I don’t know that person, I give them preferential roles. They go, “Oh, that was okay. That was fine.” You know, but once you’ve built that relationship with them, they’re happy to go the extra mile..

Alex Tanti: You can then get them to dig for 12 hours!

Chris: We’ve really made them feel part of the event team as well. I call them the legends of BigFeat because BigFeat was our play on the Big Foot. We can’t do it without them. We always say, “Be part of the event team.” They’re not just volunteering for us, you know, they love to come and experience everything. People love seeing it from the other side, Alex, to be honest with you. I heard a quote earlier on in the last year that said, ‘Bring more to the table than you take from it,’ and I think that’s true in everything. But when I think about our event company, it’s good to remind people that yes, you can come and do every single event and blah, blah, blah. But these events can’t be put on without people giving up their time. Everyone wants to run Parkrun, for example, but you have got to be able to give up your time as well; otherwise, parkrun wouldn’t exist. I try to remind people, not that they’ve got an obligation to but, you know, they can…it’s always good to give a lot more as well from helping on the other side and seeing how the mechanics of running the event work from behind. So, it gives them another perspective.

Alex Tanti: It’s common to see people regret registering as volunteers, but they never regret actually having volunteered after the event.

Claire: That is exactly right. Once they do it, they go, “Oh, really loved that.” Some people do worry a bit and lack confidence such as ‘Oh, do I get any training? What do I do? How do I cross them over that road?’ “

Chris: We’ll see that because we sometimes get a lot of emails from one or two people in particular asking a lot of questions. You baby-step them into it and help them because we want everyone to go out there and be confident, enjoy themselves, and have a good time. You know, we don’t want anyone standing in a marshal position going, “What if I get it wrong?”

Alex Tanti: One last question. Increasing the number of events naturally increases the amount of risk you’re taking on board in terms of one of those events having to be cancelled for weather or whatever reason. How do you handle that? What have you found is a way that people find acceptable, or how do you manage expectations around that?

Chris: We’ve been quite fortunate, really. We had to cancel our big Christmas event at the last minute, and it was tough. It was the right decision, though. We constantly monitored the weather and discussed it, and ultimately, safety comes first. It wouldn’t have been safe to hold the event with the conditions we were facing, so we made the call to cancel it.

Claire: It was really about communication for us. A week before the event, we started putting out emails to everyone involved, saying, “Look, it’s looking a bit iffy with the weather. We’re keeping an eye on it.” We just kept everyone updated every step of the way. And when we finally had to cancel, we explained why, detailing the safety concerns and the conditions. Most people were understanding; they appreciated being kept in the loop.

Chris: That’s it, really. The community we’ve built trusts us to make the right decisions. We don’t make these decisions lightly. When we’ve had to make tough calls, like canceling an event, people know it’s because we genuinely care about their safety and their experience. That trust goes a long way.

Claire: And the options we offered were important too. We gave people the choice to defer their entry to the next year, transfer to another event, or take a partial refund. We tried to be as fair as possible, given the circumstances. It’s never easy, but being transparent and offering options helped a lot.

Alex Tanti: That’s very professional. And at the end of the day, it’s about using common sense, isn’t it? It’s what’s best for everyone involved.

Chris: Exactly. We aim to run our events as professionally as possible while still being accessible and maintaining that community feel. It’s about striking that balance, and thankfully, our participants see that. They appreciate the effort we put in to ensure everyone has a great experience, whether the event goes ahead as planned or we face unexpected challenges.

Alex Tanti: It’s a testament to the amazing work that you guys are doing, and I must say, you’re role models and incredible examples of what can be done with passion and tenacity. So, unfortunately, we’re out of time, but this has been incredibly insightful, and with some amazing takeaways for both beginner and veteran organisers alike. Thank you for your time!

Follow BigFeat on Instagram and Facebook @bigfeatevents and their website on www.bigfeatevents.com

A conversation with Chris and Claire from BigFeat Events. was originally published in Racecheck on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.