Slowly but surely, there is a trickle of road races reappearing on the calendar. They are still pretty thin on the ground but there are events if you are prepared to travel.
I was updating my list of half-marathons in Ireland yesterday and I counted a total of 17 half events.
- One was cancelled
- Two were virtual
- Six had sold out
- Many were still open
At the moment, there is a limit of 200 entries for outdoor events. Some organisers are doubling up on their capacity by starting in two waves i.e. 200 + 200 giving a max of 400 participants.
It seems as if that will be the trend for the foreseeable future until the outdoor numbers are relaxed. If the numbers went up from 200 to say 500 then that would ease things a lot.
The thing about running events now is that they can have a lot of overheads to cover. If the numbers aren't large enough then the event would be run at a loss. For some, 200 runners participating is just too small.
There are also a few small local races reappearing in Cork, I updated the calendar with these if they're of interest.
So the take home message is that it's not all gloom and doom. There are plenty of events out there if you're prepared to travel. With the M8 motorway, you can get up from Cork City to the outskirts of Dublin in the same time it takes to drive to some locations in West Cork or Kerry.
You just need to plan ahead, pick your event and enter as early as possible.
Absolutely John, I am sitting in Mullingar awaiting a 5km later tonight , being held almost on the Westmeath/ Meath border. Hopefully, in time, things can open up again. In the meantime, stay safe and keep up the good work.
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely great to see and never realised how good races were for me since doing my first races recently since March 2020. Only thing that bugs me about races in this new era is the amount of plastic bottle waste that I see goes into the same bins as banana skins. Race organisers should ask for the numbers back with the chips to reuse in future races also.
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