Literally, I have done over a hundred road races in my lifetime and had previously volunteered zero times. This weekend, I decided to give back to the local road racing community, as I volunteered for the Colfax Marathon.

Saturday was spent in City Park, which was coined “Marathon Village” for the race and the site of the Expo. The advantage of having the Expo in City Park were most likely cost and that it was the same site as the start/finish of the race. However, it makes logistics a bit tough. Everything was inside a few large tents. The nice thing about an Expo that is held in a convention center and/or Hotel is that you can walk in and immediately see where everything is located. I dealt with a decent amount of runners who were confused, on where to go, but that might be typical.

I took on a few tasks, first working t-shirt distribution. I’m rather sure that at one point Colfax Marathon stated that they would be handing out technical shirts this year, instead they were simple cotton shirts, however they did offer gender specific shirts, which is nice for women runners. The first problem was that by Saturday morning they were already out of women small shirts for the relay and the half marathon. That day I heard it from the women and about 35% of them wanted a small t-shirt.

Here are a few collections of quotes:
“No smalls! They did this last year as well”
“But I checked off small on my registration, why they even ask if they aren’t going to have the shirt in my request size”
“A medium is too big; I guess I will use this shirt for cleaning around the house!”

I then thought of the classic Seinfeld episode.

Jerry: I don’t understand. Do you have my reservation?
Car Rental Assistant: We have your reservation, we just ran out of cars.
Jerry: But the reservation keeps the car here, that’s why you have the reservation!
Car Rental Assistant: I think I know why we have reservations.
Jerry: I don’t think you do. You see, you know how to *take* the reservation, you just don’t know how to *hold* the reservation. And that’s really the most important part of the reservation: the holding. Anybody can just take them.

I dealt with a great number of women who were not happy about not receiving the shirt that they registered for. I’m not sure on the time turn around for t-shirt making/distribution, but I think you should be able to state that if you register two weeks (or later) before the marathon we will guarantee that we will have your shirt size in stock. I honestly wonder if the t-shirt ordering was done at random or perhaps on Friday night, some women who had previously registered for a medium saw how big the medium was and switched their size to a small.

I’m still baffled on why any major race would not offer a technical shirt? This was another complaint that I heard, “Oh, its cotton.” Charge the participants in extra $5 to spring for the technical shirt, remember that race shirt is advertising and those tech shirts will get worn to the proper places hitting your target market, unlike the cotton shirt which gets worn to King Soopers.

The only other complaint that I heard that day was that runners were baffled as to why they did not get a bag to carry their chip, bib, t-shirt in. Something to think about next year Colfax Marathon.

Sunday, I sprung out of bed at 4:45am to drive to mile marker two of the half marathon, where I would be working Aid Station numero uno. I arrived to find that I would be working with volunteers from 9 News and I must say they were a great crew to work with! We got the tables set up and the Gatorade Endurance formula mixed. I have to apologize to any of the early runners who had the Gatorade, as that first batch was a bit potent and needed to be watered down. We perfected the mix on the second and subsequent batches. I also have to give praise to a guy and a girl who were in charge of supervising the aid stations. When they stopped by our area we told them that the two port-o-potties that were next to our aid station had no toilet paper. The guy made a few phone calls and realized that it was not going to be an easy fix, so he simply headed over to the gas station and purchased some. I actually ran into him at the gas station, as I was walking over there to buy the TP myself. Kudos for that move, because it was the port-o-potty company error but he remedied the error instead of doing nothing. I’m sure there would have been a great number of unhappy runners had there been no TP!

On a side note, does anyone know how a race decides the number of portable toilets to have at a race? I know that this was an issue at last year’s Colfax Marathon that they were hoping to address this year. I would think there has to be ratio of runners to toilets, if not, one needs to be calculated. If anyone knows, let me know.

I had a great time volunteering for the race and I will try to make it a point in the future to volunteer at a few races. One thing that I realized was that races really benefit from runners who volunteer. I noticed that many of the volunteers were not runners. I was asked a lot of questions that a non-runner might not know, about timing chips, type of sports drink on the course (I doubt most people know there is a difference between regular Gatorade and Endurance formula), etc.