Day 0: Buena Vista
Today racers descended upon Buena Vista in waves to get checked in for the Transrockies trail race that starts tomorrow. We volunteers were ready for them!
From 12pm-5pm, racers came to the old museum and they were welcomed and shuttled down the long line of tables as follows: sign "if you die it's not our fault" waiver, get race packet, get timing chip, get gynormous duffle bag with Gore-Tex running jacket, tech-tee, hat, Nathan single hand water bottle and carrier, salt stick tablets, and in some special cases - free shoes. Then move on down to the optional GPS Spot Tracker table where they could rent a G-Spot (yes, that's the name) so that friends and family can follow them "real time"during the race. Then on to the massage sign up table - which at one point the line was out the door and down the hall. And then they were officially ready to go.
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| Racers at dinner. |
At 5pm dinner was served at the school behind the museum. All I can say is feeding over 600 people a day (volunteers included) is no small task! Then at 6pm the racers meeting kicked off by welcoming everyone. What was really cool is they went over the first stage of the race course using Google Earth animated map on a large screen so we all had a very good sense of the route including tricky turns, sandy areas, single/double track, and so on.
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| Dinner? Only the "appetizer"...thankfully! |
At 7:30pm the volunteers meeting started. By a show of hands, I realized I was definitely in the minority of being a first year volunteer. Out of the 115 volunteers, I'd say 90 of them were veterans. That says something about how the race treats their volunteers and the fact that I was reimbursed for my lunch today only goes to support that feeling. After the crew leads were informally introduced, Kevin (one of the lead organizers and a heck of a funny guy with a nice thick Canadian accent) told us about the "hard hat" award. Every night there will be a volunteer meeting and the hard hat goes to the volunteer who went above and beyond the call of duty for that day. That person has to stand up during the meeting and say a few words about who they are and then pretty much anything else they want to say. The current holder of the award gets to decide who gets it for the next day, and so on.
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| Volunteer meeting with Kevin kicking things off. |
By 8:15pm I was headed back to the hotel and spent about an hour packing up the van in preparation for "van camping" which officially starts tomorrow even though the race starts and ends in Buena Vista. Ohhhh...another night in a hotel? I thought about it. Then decided to suck it up - gotta start camping some time!
Racers start tomorrow at 9am. We at Finish Line Catering will be at the start with water for the athletes by 8am and then on to the finish line where we'll get to welcome them in from their first day in the mountains.
Tomorrow: Stage 1 run from Buena Vista to the finish line 20.9 miles and 2550 feet of elevation gain away at Railway Bridge.
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