Boilermaker and Beyond

The ability for people to get ‘delisted’ from the race and pass it along to someone wishing to run expired Friday (June 15^th) at midnight. By this Friday (June 22^nd) all the people who received a pass code from those who decided to not to run need to be registered.

As you are aware this is the first year the Boilermaker has tried a process like this. We know that each year we’ll have a certain percentage of number of runners that for whatever reason don’t show up.  Rather than see those bibs wasted and with the rapid sellout the race experienced we thought a legal transfer process might give those ‘on the outside looking in’ one more chance at getting in.

In addition, our thoughts were that it was a good thing if a runner who was ‘good to go’ took the place of a runner who was questionable in ability to tackle 9.3 miles in the middle of July and a likely visitor to the medical tent.

So here is where it all washed out.

We ended up with a total of 690 transfer requests, 535 were for the 15k and 155 for the 5k. Nearly 100 requests came in the final day.

These numbers astounded me; I thought we would end up in the 200 person range total for both races.

This means that 3.82 % of the 15k and 3.87% of the 5k field got out of the race.  Sort of amazing to see that the percentages of transfers ended up nearly identical regardless of the race!

Where these numbers get a little ‘hinky’ is some of the people who got out of the 5k may have traded up to the 15k or visa versa. 

The power of social media really flexed its muscles to make this work. Imagine if we were still in a paper application world; it simply would have not worked.

I need to give a special thank you to Ted and Phyllis Petrillo for stepping up and being the 'go to' people on the transfer policy. The Petrillo's support of the area's running community is simply ledgendary..