Schedule a meeting with your team as far in advance of the race as possible. In the meeting discuss the following items:
Race Bible
- Download & review the race bible with the team. Be sure to emphasize rules or policies that you think will be important for the team to understand.
Participant Conditioning
- Training: Discuss how everyone is doing with their training. Plan as a team how to keep everyone in shape and healthy for race day. If you need help with training click here.
- Race day pace: Estimate what everyone's pace will be on race day. Some novice runners may not know how to estimate their pace. If this is the case we recommend doing a timed run as a team. The run should be about 5-8 miles. Tell everyone to run at about 70-80% of their max. This should give you a good estimate of how people will run on race day. If people are new to running they will most likely speed up by race day. Make your best guess as to how much they will speed up. For a Pace Calculator click here.
Securing Vehicles
- Your team will need two support vehicles for race day. The vehicles need to hold at least 6 passengers. Vehicles can be no longer than 21 feet (aprox the length of a Ford Excursion or 15 passenger van). We recommend choosing a vehicle that will have plenty of room for you to be comfortable during the long haul.
- If your team does not have access to a vehicle you may rent one at a discount from the official rental car sponsor.
Make Sleeping Arrangements
- Once you have an idea of where you’ll be during the race you need to decide as a team where you’d like to sleep. Each van will have a few hours to sleep before returning to the race course to meet up with the over vehicle. The off vehicle will have a few hours to rest before returning to the race course. You can plan to use this time to sleep, eat, or relax at the next major exchange. Using your estimates from the pace calculator find a sleep location that you can travel to and from quickly. Usually teams that book hotel rooms book them somewhere between legs 18 and 24. There are a few exchange where we will provide a place for you to sleep. For a list of exchanges with places to sleep click here. Many teams prefer to reserve a hotel room along the route. For a list of hotels along the route click here.
Volunteers
- As a condition of participating in the race each team with even one person living within 100 miles of the course must provide 3 volunteers for race day. Talk with the team to decide how best to recruit these volunteers. At some of our races you have the option to make a donation to our charity instead of providing volunteers. See the volunteer webpage for more information.
Team Uniforms
- Many teams like to get creative with team t-shirts or costumes. Discuss this with your team. If you decide to get creative we recommend putting one person in charge of pulling things together.
