I received this email from the Treasure of the Coast Marathon.
I filled out their survey and then sent a personal email to the race officials. A copy appears below:
Dear Treasure of the Coast Marathon officials,
I completed the anonymous survey regarding this year’s event but have no problem signing my name to my comments which I hope you will take in the spirit of constructive criticism.
This is a copy of my additional comments section of that survey:
“I was one of 51 runners who were misdirected in the opening miles. I ran a detour on my own to make up the distance around mile 5. I was ok with all of that. I was ok that I fell along the way and got banged up, bleeding and bruised. All that is part of the running experience. I was profoundly disappointed in press coverage and quotes from race organizers regarding the issues with misdirected runners as I felt they did not take stock of what happened and view it as a learning experience to improve. Instead the comments felt like a defensive shift of blame and denial of possible areas to improve. I was also just notified my time was adjusted to reflect a missed section of the course… even though I had made my own efforts to correct along the way. So be it. But it all felt oddly impersonal, detached, and unsportsmanlike. A disappointing experience made ever more so by the race organization. Mistakes happen, efforts are made to correct but I found the actions taken by the organizers to be initially far too defensive and subsequently far too unilateral.”
***
I would go further to say that we all make mistakes; it’s what we do AFTER the mistakes that truly define the situation. I chose to run a detour to make up for the missing mileage during the event to get back on track (I’ve attached a screengrab from my Garmin Connect app to reflect this). I felt the Treasure of the Coast Marathon team displayed as I said above a cavalier attitude that in many ways made me feel like the organization didn’t care about their runners. We can all be quoted out of context but the press reporting included comments that I felt dishonored me as a runner and as a person. There were apparently 177 marathon finishers, according to your race results website. So 51 out of 177 runners, or 28.8% of the field, were misdirected. That’s a lot of people. Perhaps we as runners should have known better; I can say when we figured out what happened some of us made adjustments (I saw two or three other people on my way back into the stream of runners doing the same detour I took).
To be honest, I was okay with what happened right up until the press coverage. Even after that, rather than remain upset, I tried to accept it again as just one of those things. But to have received your email this morning unilaterally altering my time felt like one final insult to injury from the Treasure of the Coast Marathon. I am profoundly disappointed in your event’s handling of this situation.
Sincerely,
Kevin Hanna
There is more I could say but it’s a lot of expletives and four-letter words. So further the runner says not.