Organizing a race is hard

"Organizing a race is hard."

A seasoned race organizer and former timer shared wisdom on a recent Zoom call.

"More things are going to go wrong than they're going to go right. And the runners are going to blame the race director first."

He continued, “Every race you learn something. You get better at it. And the closer you are with your timing and registration partners, the better you’ll be.”

What he said is the truth — putting on a race is not easy.

Runners show up on race morning with no idea how much work happened behind the scenes to make the event possible.

It reminded me of the tweet below from Stripe co-founder John Collison.

(Shoutout to Stripe for helping us securely process payments through Run The Day’s registration platform.)

At Run The Day, we work to make things a bit easier for race directors by acting as a true race partner — combining registration and timing in one place. The goal is to streamline the process of organizing a race so that we remove a few of the headaches along the way.

And as a bonus, we want to be the easiest people to work with in our industry.

Because putting on a race is hard enough already — complicated registration software and difficult race timing shouldn’t make it even harder.

— Ian