The Building Phase
Once you’ve got the concepts, permissions, and engineering done, the real work begins. If there’s trail to clear or create for the event, this begins months and weeks ahead of the event. In our case, work parties and pre-rides started in Early-August for the September 30th event. Once you’ve got trails cleared and ready, it’s time to start building the route sheet. An enduro route sheet needs to be accurate to the hundredth of a mile. So that probably means multiple pre-rides over the same trails to make sure that you’ve done your math correctly. In my case, October Mountain is about 100 miles away from my house. So a 200-mile round trip was made six times in getting the event ready.
Then, there’s the multitude of other details that make an event go: food for the club, event t-shirts, sign-up, tech inspection, portable toilets, and all the checkpoint equipment. I’m thankful to have had a great set of department heads (club members) who really stepped up and took care of these details. A great event doesn’t happen without a great club!
The last part of the building phase is arrowing. Again, the Pathfinders have become a great team at putting on quality events. We started building our grass track and arrowing the course at 10:00 AM on the Saturday before the event and we were done by 4:00 PM. Plenty of time to get to the hotels and relax over a burger and a beer.
Execution Phase: Turning On the Machine
So, once you’ve spent months conceptualizing, permitting, engineering, and building the machine, it’s finally time to turn it on. At precisely 9:00 AM on Sunday, September 30th the RocktoberFast enduro machine was switched on. Because enduros run on a time schedule, once an event is started there’s not much you can do to fix any mistakes along the way. The machine is switched on like some steam-powered behemoth from the Ford auto factory during the industrial revolution and it’s just going to keep running until it’s done or it completely implodes. You’ve just got to let it play out and hope that you’ve perfected every single detail: are there enough copies of the route sheet?, are there enough stickie-backs for everyone?, will all the check crews find their way to the proper spots?, will the sweep crew get stuck helping an injured rider?, did greenies invade the forest last night and mess with our arrows? These are all the questions that cost me sleep on that Saturday night but now that the event has begun, I’m powerless to do much about them.
Ed Ventura and I spent the time during the event buzzing around the forest checking on critical points in the course and check crews. He and I know the forest so well now that we have our own language of nicknames for locations and trails. We know just where to be to try to help things go right.
Turning It Off
Thanks to a lot of hard work by the Pathfinders and the Berkshire Trail Riders, the event came off very well. Even though the rain in the previous week made the course much more difficult than I’d planned, it seemed to be popular with the riders and they complimented us on the quality of the arrowing and route sheet. So the machine’s off for the next 10 months until we start prepping for the next one.