Race Recap: Beat the Blerch Virtual Half Marathon

Beat the Blerch Virtual Half Marathon 11/1/18 Cedar Falls, IA

Weather: 40 degrees, sunny
Terrain: Recreation trails and some sidewalks

Distance: 13.1 miles

A recap for a virtual race? Why not? This will be somewhat tongue-in-cheek. Essentially, I was my own race director. Any complaints or constructive compliments (tm The Office) will be directed mostly toward myself.

To start: the kit, made by the guy who does The Oatmeal online comics and featuring "the blerch," is awesome. There is a tech-fabric t-shirt, a medal (with a little door that opens up to show the food inside the Blerch's stomach), a stress ball, sunglasses, and a sticker. At $50 it's a bit pricey, but what you get it very cool and I like supporting The Oatmeal. The kit, as far as virtual race kits go, gets an A from me.

The rest of the race experience is entirely up to me as the end consumer, so here we go. I decided to start and end from the most logical place: my house. It took me a (sadly) long time to map out exactly 13.1 miles in a nice tidy loop, trying to avoid more wooded trails that would have too many leaves and bits of detritus for me to trip over or roll my ankle on. Once I had finally settled on a course, I waited for a beautiful Thursday where the weather was fine, which happened to be after three consecutive days of hard workouts. OH WELL, let's see how this goes!

The first couple miles were largely downhill, since I live in a high part of town. I tried not to think about how I would then have to go uphill for the last couple of miles. (What idiot designed this course?) There was a heated bathroom around mile 4, which was brilliant. Water stops were not a problem, as I had my Camelbak, but the on-course nutrition was gross. I had these Clif Bloks from my Spartan Beast that I'd never eaten. Turns out they taste like someone made strawberry Gushers with a handful of household dust, but they worked, dammit. I had plenty of energy. There were not many folks out on the course that day and ZERO spectators, except for the lady who was smoking outside the gas station at mile 11. But I was able to keep up a decent jogging pace almost the whole time, only walking a few steep uphill portions for a total of maybe 5 minutes of the total race time. 

I'd never run for over 2 hours before, so the last couple miles uphill featured some abysmal posture. But I was overall very pleasantly surprised with how much of an effort I was able to put out after doing spin classes on Monday and Wednesday prior. My pacing was even and I crossed "the finish line" in 2:30 flat. Considering my previous half marathon PR was 2:41 and change, I was totally thrilled. The post-race food spread was the greatest I'd ever seen: Panera mac and cheese and a Diet Pepsi. Great work, Race Director!

Pros:

-Swag. What a great kit.

-Race was very uncrowded and low-key.

-I knew every inch of the course in advance.

Cons:

-No mile markers. What laziness.

-No spectators or fellow participants. Had to provide own "jush."

-Hard for a virtual race to feel "official." But I'm calling that a PR, dammit.

Race Grade: A-. The cons of it "not being an actual race" were overshadowed by how freakin' awesome I did and how delicious that lunch was afterward. Choosing your own post-race spread: highly recommended.

(Mis)Adventures in Customer Service

As a person who has done a LOT of races (my road race count is over 60, plus about 10 OCRs), I have a pretty good sense of how things work. I don't usually have a lot of questions or complaints. If there is a dreadnought roving photographer (see previous entry), I know better than to complain or ask where the hell the pictures are. I understand the concept of "no refunds" and such.

That said, there are some times when one needs to complain. Or at least, needs to ask clarifying questions. The squeaky wheel gets the grease. In these situations, it is important for race directors or their peons to remember the Golden Rule of customer service. No, it's not "the customer is always right," because that is a load of horse crap. It's "do not ignore your customer." Nothing chaps my 'nads more than being totally ignored by the powers that be when I ask what should be a very basic question.

Here are a few examples of recent customer-service-adjacent interactions that I have had with race staff, from "great" to "WTF."

GREAT Customer Service: The Abominable Snow Race

I was a bit nervous about this one because they had to change the location and date of the race after registration started. Then I became even more nervous when they switched from a two-day event (I'd signed up for both races) to a one-day event. But shortly after I went all "whaaaaat is going on here" on Facebook, the race director messaged me his personal phone number and asked me to call him. We had a lovely conversation, all my questions and concerns were answered to my satisfaction, and I gained critical understanding of what had caused all these crazy circumstances to pop up in the first place.

Lesson learned: most customers will "get it" if given a chance. Promptly and honestly addressing issues goes a long way.

HIT-OR-MISS Customer Service: Spartan Race

Generally there are few issues that come up with Spartan events. They are a big company and have this shit down, for the most part. But Spartan is (in)famously bad at dealing with weather. They tend to not provide good updates for racers, who are stuck in their cars in the parking lot with little to no cell service to even read event Tweets (if Spartan can be bothered to post them). In the immediate aftermath of Spartan Minnesota's afternoon cancellation, I was pretty annoyed and sent them messages on Facebook (their seemingly-preferred method of communication) which were basically responded to with "we DID update you, you are wrong, suck it." I wrote back after a week and tried to remain calm and specific with "my demands," which were essentially to have another shot at finishing a Spartan Sprint (I gave a specific race that I wanted to do, also). Their response was a surprising but welcome "of course! Here's a code!"

Lesson learned: there are often teams of customer-service agents and you might get a bad one on your initial inquiry. Try again until someone reasonable answers. And remain calm. No need to write F-bombs to these folks who probably don't get paid NEARLY enough.

TERRIBLE Customer Service: Terrain Race

Terrain Race has famously bad customer service, so I wasn't expecting much. I honestly wasn't planning to complain at all about the fairly minor issues I had with Terrain Race. But then I noticed a lot of people were pissed that there were no results or pictures posted from their events. And I noticed that there hadn't been a photographer at the Oshkosh race that I did, or if there was I didn't see him/her. So it became a matter of principle for me to message them and ask "was there a photographer there? I understand if the pics take a while to upload, but just be straight with me, was there even a photographer?" I have now asked this question of Terrain Race on FIVE separate occasions over the last several weeks. I got a response once, at around attempt #3, of "we will look into it." Every other communication I've had with the race has been ignored.

Lesson learned: DON'T DO TERRAIN RACES EVER AGAIN. Photos are a relatively minor thing to complain about, and I was just asking if they had a photographer THERE, I wasn't even demanding that they post the pics immediately or complaining that there weren't pictures of me. If a race cannot answer a very basic question, keep them off your schedule.

And because it must be said, the overall lesson learned is that good customer service will get a race return customers and great word-of-mouth. Bad customer service will kill a brand. Put your money where the good race directors are, folks!