I found it interesting to re-read this following the announcement of the new Ironman Boulder course. It serves as some food for thought when selecting any first year event.
Reflections on Ironman New York City from the perspective of a volunteer
by Sue (Notes) on Monday, August 13, 2012 at 11:58pm
Held Saturday Aug 11, along the NJ and NY shores of the Hudson River.
1. Complicated set-up. My friend was able to travel to Manhattan to get our volunteer shirts and bracelets as required ahead of time, which allowed us access to the transition area. Thank goodness, or I couldn’t have volunteered on a Saturday without having taken a vacation half day at least to get to/from Manhattan on Wed-Fri.
2. Complicated set-up. Even though transition was in New Jersey, the head volunteer organizer was telling everyone they needed to be in Manhattan to catch a 3:30 am ferry over to transition, for a volunteer shift that started at 7 am. Uhm, no. They did eventually add a 5:00/30 ferry over, but the truth was you could park in NJ and simply bike down the hill. I’m sure it’s simplest to tell everyone to do the same one thing, but making this as practical as possible for your volunteers is also a good business idea.
3. Complicated set-up. Athletes were to take a ferry to/from transition to drop their bikes and gear bags sometime Thur-Fri. They took a ferry to transition early race morning, then were ferried to the swim start 2.4 mi up-river. In my experience, this is already a very long and tiring day – as a participant, I’d rather sleep the extra 1.5 hours vs being ferried all over creation prior to the race.
4. Due to the current, the swim was very fast. Pro’s were out of the water 20 min faster than usual (first men at 39 min – that’s only 39 min to swim 2.4 miles!!!). It took ~41 min to get all the athletes into the water, setting the swim cut-off at ~10:00. The last competitor out of the water was 67 year old Nancy Bostrom from Piedmont, CA. With a swim time of 1:22:39, she completed this segment an hour faster than the time allotted! I think this is unheard of – at Lake Placid, some people don’t make the 2 h 20 min cut-off time. And for the very last swimmer to be done an hour early - that’s some current.
5. Perspectives from the vantage point of wetsuit peeling. This is a very cool place to be during the race! You see the pro’s exit, focused on the job at hand. You see the strong age-groupers who are determined to make this their best race ever. You see other age groupers who are so very excited to be there; you can see on their faces: check that box off (swim = done) and moving on to the next thing (just a little bike ride). There are blind competitors, tethered to their seeing swim guides. I had a little trouble getting the blind athlete’s wetsuit off her ankle, b/c the tether cord was tangled up around her ankle and inside the wetsuit. You see the amputee swimmers being met at the water’s edge and helped out of their suits, into their prosthetic, and guided up the ramp. There were some who stopped at the shower the athletes ran through, and took a few moments to wash their face and maybe mentally gear themselves up for the next stage. And you see the people who are just exhausted and overwhelmed by the swim, who carry a look of shock from the experience.
In case you can’t picture what wetsuit peeling entails, it involves some variation depending on how much the athlete has already taken care of themselves while running from the water. But you un-Velcro the neckline, pull the zipper down their back, pull the shoulders off and down, inverting the wetsuit as you go. Many participants had trouble getting their hands out, and they are pulling their elbows up while you are working the suit down. Hopefully you get the suit over their hips before they sit down, but in their enthusiasm some athletes just drop to the ground and lie there making this a bit harder. Then you grab the arms of the suit and pull, inverting the suit off over the legs. Some come off easily; some really seem to be suction-ed on to the athletes, leading some athletes to be dragged across the ground as the strippers pulled and pulled on the suit (I grabbed one participant under the arms to try to anchor them while the others pulled the suit free). Many suits got caught on the timing chips; some timing chips got ripped off with the suits. Imagine pulling an elastic band out, and then it snaps free as it comes off the athlete’s feet. Now imagine the spray of dirty river water that gets sling-shot all over the place. We (volunteers) all looked like we were victims of a mud firing squad, and I got reminded that the Hudson is salty when I got shot in the face with water from more than one suit removal (yuck). This was a very fun, in-the-trenches volunteer job, and I highly recommend you give it a try!
6. Perspectives of T1 bag handling, from what Marianne tells me. Athletes come out of water and step over a timing mat, bringing up their name on a teleprompter that the announcer (Mike Riley was at this race) reads. He can’t get to all the names when people come out in bunches, but many athletes get, “here’s So-and-So from Place, great job!” announced over the pump-you-up music that is playing. Most athletes remove their goggles and race-numbered swim caps immediately, leaving them visually unidentifiable if their body marking was completely rubbed free during the swim. This makes the job of the bag handlers tough, because they can’t get the bag up off the ground for the athlete if they can’t find their number on the athlete. Many athletes knew right where their bags were, but some overshot their bags as they ran through the narrow paths through them, and it was difficult for the volunteers to jog upstream of the downstream athletes pouring through to get to the overrun bag. This situation was easier in Lake Placid, where the bags were on numbered racks and the athletes picked them up themselves from the hanging system. Marianne picked up a great idea for our upcoming race – make your bag stand out with brightly colored tape (just like people do with their luggage while flying), to make your bag different from the sea of otherwise identical bags. She also noted how muscle-y-fit the pro women were; not just thin/no body fat, but ripped.
7. Bike out is up a long steep hill, which had to be rough after the swim. Once the athletes left, the spectators did too, and it got pretty quiet.
8. In line for my free volunteer breakfast, I was talking with my fellow strippers about what brought us to this race. They were locals from NJ and NYC who were really excited to have this event so close, and are hoping to see additional recreational opportunities come to the Hudson and NYC area. From their perspective, the registration price ($895 and ~$300 more than many other U.S. courses) was a bargain, since they would have no travel/accommodations cost. They asked if I would consider doing this race. For my immense training efforts, I personally want to go somewhere beautiful, and for me, NYC doesn’t qualify. But never say never, right? (PS – the registration fee for the 2013 race went up to a grotesque $1200, which the Manhattanites are still defending is a bargain!!!)
In this window where all the bikes were gone, those wanting to leave after their first shift could head out via the only access road (vs taking the ferry to Manhattan), and after breakfast Marianne took the chance to head home. This was a boring period of time, ~ 1.5 h, when the athletes were gone and so were the spectators. The music was either turned way down or stopped, and there wasn’t much to do. I should have brought a book b/c 1.5 h is a bit of a long time to fiddle with my smart phone. I overheard a volunteer organizer asking for advice, as spectators were trying to walk up/down the bike out road to line/spectate, and were apparently furious when told they were not allowed to. Looks to me like Ironman gave in, because the road was certainly lined with people when the cyclists came back. I noticed one other dirty-shirt hanging around – another wetsuit stripper who, like me, was also doing the T2 bike handling shift. He was also doing a third shift later that evening, driving athletes around at 1 am after the race to collect their belongings? Three volunteer shifts, from early to late – that guy was hard core; he thought it was cool this event was taking place so close to him (from central Jersey) that he wanted to “be a part of it, (New York, New York)”.
Word was coming in that people wondered whether the swim was shortened to 1.2 mi, due to the very fast times posted. And people asked about the swimmer who didn’t make it, but no one knew much. During the wetsuit stripping, I saw the suited up diver talking to a race organizer about it. Unlike my experience at the NYC Olympic race in 2011, I didn’t see anything else. Thank goodness, b/c it is terrible seeing an unresponsive person being hustled by you while medical staff yell at people to move, and others perform chest compressions and operate a respiratory bag. The victim was 43 – it really touches home that the people who die at these things are frequently right around my age… (By the way, I had an EKG done at my physical last month – hopefully no undiagnosed heart conditions here…)
9. Checked in for Bike-to-Run bike handling, and got more instruction than I did for wet suit peeling (good), but we had too few people to do the job well (not-so-good). Some folks combined brain power and thought that moving around some of the bike racks and fences would make our jobs easier in the heat of the large influx of cyclists, but I don’t think this actually helped.
We knew the first pro was on his way by the helicopter hovering overhead. Our first “customer”! He ran by us and literally tossed his bicycle at one of the handlers… who dropped it! No worries, I’m sure those $10,000 bicycles are hearty :-\ We got much better at this as time moved on, achieving a neat running hand-off between the athlete and the handler. But then the flow of returning athletes increased, and in a moment we were overwhelmed. Handlers were inadvertently getting in the way of type-A athletes. We couldn’t get the bikes racked fast enough and had to resort to simply stacking them along the fence. Several athletes came in with missing bike numbers – a terrible situation since that number is needed later on to ensure the right person is taking the right bicycle home with them. A bit taxed after 112 miles in what felt like 90 degree heat plus high humidity, some athletes just tossed their helmets and shoes at us (they are supposed to keep these items with them), but we already had no idea what bike they went with. (Well helmets are numbered, but shoes are not.) The single most common thing I saw was cyclists who forgot to take their Garmin’s off the bike and were coming back to do that once we had their bikes. This was a problem once the bikes were stacked in a random location inside transition and couldn’t easily be located :-\ The range of focus or fatigue on the faces of the athletes was certainly exaggerated from the swim to the bike finish.
Someone rallied together additional volunteers and built an assembly line, where we could just roll the bikes from one to another and get them moved to another area of transition, b/c we were so backed up that there was literally no place to stick the bikes while people kept pouring in. It took us hours to get those things racked. Many of them were broken and I have no idea how the athletes got in with them. One had a broken seat, another was missing a crank arm, another with the hand brake folded over as though it had been in a crash. I saw people with bloodied and torn clothing who crossed into transition like they intended to carry on.
Eventually there was a lull and we were told there were some 20 athletes still out on the course. I met a participant who appeared pretty upset. I told her not to worry, she had made the bike cut-off (by 10 min), and that she had plenty of time; soon the sun was going to go down and she was going to feel a lot better. I think she was sobbing behind her sunglasses. Someone else ran up to her and then she entered transition. She left transition in fresh clothing a few minutes later. The last person we helped came in by the skin of her teeth. We took her bike and told her she had 10 seconds to get across the timing mat, or she couldn’t go on. Can’t believe the sprint that girl pulled out to bust across that mat, managing to cross before the 10th second had expired.
On my way out, up the one road access to/from Ross Doc, I passed three athletes coming down the hill and a convoy including a pickup truck carrying several bicycles, and a van. I’m guessing they had swept the course and were driving people in. I also passed runners trucking along on the Hudson Terrace/River Dr, continuing pursuit of their Iron dream.
10. Reading athlete reviews of this race on Facebook, the feedback is very polarized; many had fabulous experiences and others felt it was far short of their expectations based on other Ironman events they’d completed. Two great positive comments I saw were from a woman who had bike trouble and ran 20 km back to transition – apparently a spectator gave her their shoes so she could run better (cycling shoes are *terrible* for running). Another woman was thankful for a volunteer who tied her shoes for her during the run, which she was too taxed to bend over and do herself. But mainly I’ve seen negative comments, ranging from loss of wetsuits, loss of someone’s $5000 bike, dangerous bike and run courses, lack of spectator opportunities, horrible logistics, clueless volunteers, no finisher’s name called out or music after 10 pm, receiving finisher’s medals from Ironman Kentucky... I’m guessing polarized comments are found for any event, but something particular must have come up b/c 28 hours after opening registration to the general public, Ironman has suspended further registration and are fully refunding current registrants, holding their spots pending re-opening of registration. That’s remarkable.
Ironman’s letter can be found here:
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