Picking up from yesterday –
Now, a smart person would’ve immediately corrected course and figured out the race within a two-hour radius that day and done that one.
And someone did point out that race on Facebook. And I started to look into it a little. But I was tired and didn’t know the easiest way to go so far – seemed too expensive to take a rideshare vehicle. And I was so tired, I didn’t think it would’ve been super safe for me to get get a car and drive it. And on and on and on. Blah blah blah – stuff that could’ve been figured out, but I didn’t.
Instead, I went down and got my packet, and talked with the man from the Facebook comments.
He was nicer in real life. (Of course. People usually are.) But he still held his ground a bit.
He kept explaining that there wasn’t time to send an email until many, many hours later because
a) He had to order and pickup the sign for the expo.
b) Packet pick-up was so swamped that they didn’t have the time during those hours.
…But here are my two issues.
- Who cares about printing a sign? Having a sign printed, I feel, is one of the least of your worries. Write something huge in sharpie if you need to. If the sign is keeping you from sending an email – an email is so much more important.
- Packet pick-up is now a moot thing. There’s not even a reason to have it anymore. My feeling was that if people had actually known the race was cancelled that I would assume only half or even fewer people would actually show up. (Because why would they?)
Basically, we just had very differing views of the situation. His view was that he was trying to problem solve as fast as possible, and to him the way to problem solve was to turn the race into a “virtual race.”
It sounded like he made the assumption everyone would still want to do it – they’d still want their shirt and medal and would just do the mileage on their own.
I mean, okay. I guess I kinda sorta see that, maybe. But I’m not paying tons of money to fly to Florida just to get a medal for a virtual race. That seems very silly and kind of defeats the purpose of a virtual race…
Also, as he re-explained to me how a bunch of people who do most (or all) of his races are his Facebook friends, and that word spread quickly among the Florida crowd.
And this is where I’ll pick up tomorrow!