I have personally run a fair number of 5K races going back to Junior High School to date. My largest involvement with coordinating a 5K had been helping my High School Cross Country coach carry the finish line shoot clock from the team bus to the finish line a few times though. This past
Spring a local non-profit organization that I volunteer for decided that we would start conducting an annual 5K run/walk to help raise funds for chapter operations. After a lot of time, planning, and hard work by a lot of the organization members, we put together a fairly smooth run 5K. The following are some helpful tips for the first time 5K race coordinator that will hopefully help you host a good event with minimal headache.
What Are Your 5K Race Goals?
A key to a successfully run 5K is the pre-event planning. First, you need to determine what your organization’s goals are for the race. Common reasons for conducting a 5K race are: 1 – To raise money for your organization or charity, 2 – For the fun and enjoyment of your runners, and 3 – To celebrate a major event or holiday such as Labor Day, Thanksgiving, or 9/11. Based on these goals, you should determine the goal number of participants in the 5K because this will drive a lot of your pre-race costs. If you just don’t know, but have a primary work or non-profit organization that is supporting you for conduct of the race, then a good rule of thumb I have found is about six in ten co-workers will participate if you make the 5K race a ‘run/walk’ vice run only.
Setting the Race Date and Location
Once your goals for the 5K are established, the next two items that need to be determined are the race date and course. You should have a primary, secondary, and tertiary date in mind to go with a primary and secondary course location. The dates and location are inter-related to a degree. If you are conducting your first 5K race as the coordinator, I recommend you use a racecourse that is already defined and used at some other point during the year. This will save a lot of time and effort on your part because there will already be people in the community familiar with the route to include the police and medical personnel. Depending on what you are planning to do for post-race beverages, food, and awards, you will want to also take into account the available facilities near the finish line of the race to conduct post-race events in your 5K course selection determination. Entering this phase of the process also allows you to setup an alternate date for the race in the event of severe weather that prevents the 5K race from occurring (lightning storms, blizzards, etc). Six to Eight weeks before your targeted race date is the best time to have the course and date of the race arranged. The closer to four weeks before race day that you push, the tighter your timeline for finishing pre-race preparations becomes. Ultimately, your race turnout will be negatively affected by lack of lead-time in publicizing the 5K to the potential runners. Another factor to take into account before finalizing your 5K race date is to find a date that doesn’t conflict with other local area 5K’s or triathlons. This will only reduce your potential runner base for the race. To do this, you can check with the local running club, google, and on active.com for registered events in your area.
Getting Volunteers
When I started making arrangements for the first 5K that I coordinated, I did not solicit my volunteers until later in the process and this was a mistake. At the very latest, you should have at least 4 primary volunteers lined -up at this point or work to confirm by this point in the process. These will be your core group of assistants for conduct of the 5K race, and will help to ensure you are able to cover all of the small issues that arise on race day. As the overall coordinator it will be impossible for you to be everywhere that you are needed at one time on the day of the 5K. You will want to shoot for at least 12 to 16 overall volunteers for the race, and more if you have a 5K race course that has a lot of city street turns (one volunteer at every major race turn is recommended). We will cover in more detail where you will use the volunteers later in the article.
What Gear do You Need to Conduct the 5K Race?
First, you need to setup race registration tables. These should be setup and manned at least 90 minutes prior to race time. Two folding tables work well for registration. One to check off pre-registered racers, or take information and money from day of event registrations. The second to hand out race t-shirts and any grab bags or other participant SWAG you are handing out. You will want to have a few copies of the pre-registered runners at the tables along with a bank to provide change to participants paying on the day of the race.
Second, you need to determine how you are going to setup your starting line. Typically a light tape across the road or starting path along with 2 marker cones works well. I also recommend a miniature PA system that is battery powered similar to what you see at local swim meets to help MC the starting line. A good place to start on acquiring the PA system would be your local YMCA. The starting line tape can be as easy as buying some light line or rope at the closest Hard Ware Store. The other piece of equipment required for the starting line, is the official timepiece for the race if you do not have access to a professional finish line clock. This can be as easy as a personal Garmin, or stopwatch.
Next is to focus on the finish line / shoot requirements. Depending on if you are conducting a road or cross country race, you will want to look at using traffic cones or 3-foot high stakes with line run through them respectfully. Cones work on both surfaces, however, and generally are easier to borrow from your local gym, police department, or fire department if you do not have another source to borrow them from. The next item you will need at the finish line are two folding tables. One will be setup to collect finish cards handed out to each runner as they cross the finish line that has their finishing position on the card. The runner then fills out the card with his or her name and puts the card in a shoebox on the finish table. There should be a shoebox for each age group and sex that you are offering prices for in the race. The second table should have water, cups, and I recommended a small supply of bananas and cut up orange slices. You should prepare at least 20 to 30% more finish cards than pre-registered race participants that you have at the 5K-race day minus three-day point. Also, if you are expecting 100 runners, a good number of pens or pencils to have available for runners to fill out their finish cards is about 70. Some will keep the pencils/pens, some will give them back to you. The bottom-line is you want to eliminate anything you can think of that will create a backlog at your finish line or processing station.
At your mid-point of the race, it is recommended to have a halfway station with coolers of water and a person to call out race splits to the contestants as they pass the station. Although 5K is not a long race, I have found whenever you involve runners senior to the high school level it is expected to provide water at this point. If you have enough volunteers, it is also recommended to have a monitor stationed about .75 K into the race and at the 2.25 K point.
Most of your serious runners will not need this, but for the weekend runner it is a ‘nice to have’, and as the coordinator it gives you an added monitor in the event of medical issues that can arise during a 5K race. When planning on where to place your orange cones during setup of the race, I recommend placing on at each of these points when you measure the course so that way your volunteer has a clear point to proceed to conduct his or her duties. In order to synch the volunteers time pieces with the starter, a good way to do this is to have all of these personnel in a vehicle preceding the runners if you are conducting a road race so they can start their watches with the starting gun or horn and proceed ahead of the race to their stations.
You will also want to have your awards area setup prior to the start of the race. If your race is larger than 40 runners, you will likely need a MC system of some type and another folding table or two for setting up the place prices that you
are going to pass out. I recommended doing age and sex (i.e. 10-19 year old males) based prizes with an overall top male and female runner. If you have in excess of 100 participants then you will want to consider expanding this to the top 3 overall male and female runners. Some trophy stores can take up to two weeks to produce engraved medals, plaques, trophies, etc, so you will need to take this into account when planning out your schedule for pre-race preparation.
Marketing Your Race
At this point you will want to make a race flyer to help promote your 5K. PowerPoint works well for making a decent flyer that can be burnt to Adobe PDF and printed emailed and posted online. Once you have the flyer made, active.com is a great event website that you should consider as one avenue for promoting your event. You can also setup pre-event paid registration on the site to make it easier for your race participants to sign up for the event. Be warned, however, that if you need the money from the pre-registered runners to pay for any of your upfront costs you will need to cutoff the online registration at least a week if not two weeks before race day. Active.com does not pay the event organizer through Paypal, instead they rely on paper checks to pay the event coordinators. Active.com has a simple mapping feature for showing the location of your 5K, but mapmyrun.com is an excellent website to setup a basic map of your race route to either include on the flyer or providing a URL for the flyer and your active.com site. Other locations for pre-race marketing that help drive up the number of runners you will see are: Craig’s list, myspace, facebook, email to co-workers and friends, and consider making a basic website solely for your run. You’ll also want to engage your local running club, and ask the YMCA to post the flyers as well as any other local gyms that you or your other volunteers frequent. The more visibility you can obtain for your race the more likelihood you are going to meet your goals for race participants and any associated monetary goals that you have for the 5K.
5K Race Day
On race day, you will need volunteers at the following locations at a minimum:
Registration Station – 2 volunteers
Starting Line – 2 volunteers
Finish Line – 2-3 volunteers
Mid-Way Point – 2 volunteers
Awards/ Post Race Food Area – 2 volunteers
Race Monitors – 2-4 Volunteers
Medical Personnel – 2 volunteers
Photographers – 1-2 volunteers
Medical and Police support is critical. You don’t know a full-blown doctor, but two EMT’s or above are recommended in the event of serious medical issues arising during or after the race. Police support for helping you keep unauthorized traffic off of the racecourse also pays big dividends. Typically if you offer free food and beverage, if one of the on-shift policemen is free they will support your race if no other emergencies arise. They other nice thing with a police presence, is that in the unfortunate circumstance of someone having to leave your race by ambulance, they can call the dispatch directly without having to worry about having cell phone coverage or other delays.
About 30 minutes before your published race time, you will want to start encouraging your runners to proceed to the general area of the starting line. About 10 minutes prior, putting out how long to race time over your MC system also helps the procrastinators start moving in the right direction as well. Once you start the race, you then shift to post race processing unless you have a medical issue.
Post-Race Awards and Food
One of the hardest things to do is delay handing out your place prices until all of the participants have finished the race. By no means something you have to do, just the polite thing. Ensure your photographers are setup to take pictures of each runner who wins a medal or overall category. Also, if you are going to hand out door prizes the time to do so is after you award your place prices to the 5K runners. If you are providing food and beverage to the runners as part of the registration fee, you will want to make this available to the runners as they finish, which will keep the boredom level to a minimum while waiting on the final runners to come in. After the awards are complete, you will need to make sure that you have volunteers who have agreed to assist with post-race cleanup and equipment breakdown. If you are not clear on this topic, you could find yourself as the race coordinator picking up from the entire race! The biggest point to remember is that you want to leave a good impression on the facilities manager that is letting you conduct your race so your organization is welcome again the next year.
Post Race
Within 24-48 hours of the 5K being finished you will want to email the race results to all contestants and post online (active.com lets the coordinator do both of these functions). You will also want to post the race pictures online and email individual ones to runners if you can do so. Another post-race marketing action to consider is if you desire any press coverage for the event or submission of a summary of the event to the local paper, online website, etc.
Summary
Although not all encompassing, this article should help the first time race coordinator save time and provide some ideas that he or she might not think of until too late in the planning cycle for putting on a successful 5K race.
