The following email went out to all Cotswold113 2017 Competitors tonight
Cotswold 113 Post race mail
Hi All
I hope everyone’s starting their recovery from yesterday’s race ?.
The sports scientists will have you believe that Protein and Carbs at regular intervals with lots of water are the best forms of recovery along with regular mild exercise and compression. However, I like Beer, Pizza and a hot Bath (Sometimes all at the same time), so I hope you’re all doing the same
Firstly, and most importantly, thank you all very much for choosing to race with us Yesterday.
I’m sure you’re all bored of reading my long emails, so I’ll keep this one quite brief. In this mail, I’ll cover the following:
How fast you went and how you looked doing it (results and photo’s)
Racecheck reviews
Honest Appraisal of the race from us/you
Marshalling with us
Our other races
How fast you went and how you looked doing it (results and photo’s)
I know this is probably the only thing you’re all interested in, so here’s the results from yesterday:
http://dbmaxresults.co.uk/results.aspx?CId=16421&RId=2174&EId=1&st=GhDdJIIPDEQnoqPyObrw%2bw%3d%3d
You can find the photo’s here (as they’re being uploaded today/tomorrow):
https://www.charleswhittonphotography.com/cotswold-113-tri-4617
We pay for your first couple of downloads from the site, and Charles then puts the remaining photo’s up that you can purchase as either a download, printed onto a cup or I think you can even have them printed onto a pillow nowadays if you fancied cuddling up to yourself at night 🙂
If anyone has a worse photo than the one of me when I had a meltdown at IM Switzerland a couple of miles before the end of the run a few years ago, I’ll buy you a pint after the next race 🙂 Mouthful of puke Photo HERE
Racecheck reviews
Many of you will already use racecheck.com for race reviews, and we’d love to have you review yesterday’s race on there for us. Also, Racecheck will pick one Cotswold113 2017 review at random for us, and we’ll give the winner a free entry to next year’s 113 Race
You can review our race here – https://www.racecheck.com/races/cotswold-113-1
Honest Appraisal of the race from us/you
As hopefully you’ll have seen, we’re committed to make this the race for the competitors, and we’re constantly looking for ways we can either improve, or just to offer those little things that make all the difference.
We see the race from one perspective, but it’s totally different to the angle you all see it from, and we’d love to hear from you and what you think worked, and what you think didn’t
We’re having a team debrief in a couple of days, where we sit down as the 12 of us who make up the main team, and we literally go through every single thing to do with the race right through from Wednesday when build starts, through to Sunday Night tear down and Monday/Tuesday counting and storing of all the kit with all the race details in-between.
Anything you can all send me on your thoughts of the race will go into that debrief and we’ll see what we can either do more of that you like, or change that you don’t, or just tweak where you feel a tweak is required.
We love criticism as it’s the only way we can improve and if we don’t know that something didn’t perhaps work quite as well as we’d hoped, we can’t try to fix it, so please nit pick and be critical as that’s the only way we can learn.
From our side, the race went ok without too many hitches. It’s never a smooth process, and if it was, I’d be very worried.
The parking was a big issue, and I can only apologise for that, but I hope that being open and honest with you before the event went some way to prepare you for it and I thank everyone that made an effort to lift share or get dropped off.
PSL, who own the area we park in, have just taken lease of the land behind the main lake, which, when prepared in a few weeks, will take 1,800-2,000 cars, so things will be all back to better than normal by our August race and parking should return to £5/car.
The other apology I have to make is that the numbers on the racking were, in a few cases, out of sequence. The person labelling the racking up might have had a rather long pub stop waiting for us to build the transition, and a few (around 20) of the numbers were not in the right order that we didn’t find until people were racking Sunday, so apologies to anyone that went to the effort to ask to be racked next to their mate, and ended up next to a stranger as the racking numbers were mixed up.
We have a constant dialogue with the council about pot holes, and despite us getting at them constantly, they don’t get fixed, but we do keep pestering them and one day they’ll get around to doing something. I hope us circling them in paint before Sunday went some way to help you avoid the few that are on the course ?
In terms of numbers, we’ve had similar numbers at the June race for a couple of years now, and although moving the 2017 race to 8 waves helped some of the congestion on the run course or at the unavoidable bike/run crossover junction, it still wasn’t enough in my eyes. Next year, we’ll reduce the numbers of the race down slightly to see if that sorts it. The race has grown into a bit of a monster now, and we’d rather offer a really quality experience for a few than a slightly hectic one for a lot. What that number is yet, I don’t know, but realistically, we’ll probably cap it at 900ish for 2018 instead of the 1,100 we’ve had for the last two years and see how that goes.
Marshalling with us
We had a really great team of marshals at the event yesterday, but we always need more for other events. If you fancy seeing any of our races from the other side, then we would love to have you along on the marshalling team for either the Cotswold226 on June 25th or the Cotswold Classic on August 13th – You could earn either cash in your pocket, or a decent discount on next year’s race too.
Our other races
Our August 13th Cotswold Classic (which is identical to yesterday’s Cotswold113 in every way but name and medal/shirt colour) still has around 80 slots remaining if anyone fancies another 10 weeks to train before having a crack at beating yesterdays time ? Individual and relay Entries are at www.113events.com
Right, that’s it from me. Thanks again for choosing to race with us, and we hope to see many of you racing with us again soon.
I have a small box of medals left over from yesterday too, so if you have kids that want one (After-all, they’re as much a part of your journey to the race as you are) or you just fancy another to hang on your desk, drop me a mail and I’ll post one out to you
Cheers and happy recovery
Graeme, Nicci and the 113 Events team
[email protected]
07595 591612
