The Permitting Phase
Once you’ve got a basic idea of the event that you want in your head, you’ve got to get the proper permissions. Whether you’re using private land, public land, or a mix. There is a process to getting permission to use the trail that you want. Sometimes this is easy, sometimes not so much. No matter if you’re dealing with a farmer, a ranger, or a bureaucrat, it’s all about building relationships that will last so you can do your event next season.
The Engineering Phase
Still a fun mental challenge but not nearly as fun as the conceptual phase is the engineering phase. You’ve got to make sure that your event will work according to the NETRA rule book and other practical concerns. For example, at RocktoberFast we use the same trails more than once. That means that I need to ensure that all of the riders are completely through (or at least houred out) one section before the arrows can be switched for their next time by. So, I had to do a couple critical tricks to accomplish this for this year’s ride. I needed to compress the first loop into the smallest amount of time as possible and delay the second loop. So, I decided to have five riders per row rather than the typical four. This reduces the number of rows (minutes) by 20% for the same number of riders – meaning that checkpoints can be closed that much sooner and those check crews can move to their next assignment. I also put in a long-ish reset for gas – over 30 minutes. This is not an easy decision because if it’s 39 degrees out, you don’t want to make the fast riders stand around for half an hour waiting to go and you also want to have enough time to let the slower riders get back on their minute.
Also part of the engineering phase is thinking about logistics and whether you’ll have enough people to pull off your grand design. At this year’s RocktoberFast we had eight check crews working 15 checkpoints. That meant that most of them were assigned to more than one checkpoint and probably had to move in between the first and second loops of the event. They needed to be assigned in such a way that they could wait until their checkpoint had houred out and then have enough time to drive to another point on the route and get set up in time for the fastest riders to get there.