SHM18 Pre race email #1
The following email went out to all competitors of the Nationwide Swindon Half Marathon 2018 today :
Nationwide Swindon Half Marathon – 9th Sept 18
Good evening all, I hope this email finds everyone nice and ready for Sunday’s race ? We’re in race week now, so I wanted to get a few bits of info out to everyone in the run up to the race I’m conscious that if I bombard you all with too much info, you just won’t read it anyway, as choosing which shoes to wear on Sunday and checking the BBC weather app every two mins is way more important, so I’m going to drip feed it out to you all in a few emails this week. In this first instalment email I’ll cover the following : Race information pack Registration and Bib collection On the day entries Who to contact Getting to the start and road closures Race information pack In order to reduce paper waste, you can download the race information pack here: https://newswindonhalf.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Swindon-Half-Race-Booklet.pdf Please take a few minutes to read through this, as it contains some important information for the day. Registration and bib collection By now, all 2,400 of you should have had an email from DBmax, who are our timing and bib supply partners for the race, relating to your bib and information. If you entered before August 3rd, you should by now have received your bib in the post. If you entered between August 3rd and Saturday, when entries closed, your bib will be waiting for you to collect on race weekend There’s two windows for our registration tent to be open to collect packs at the race start in the County Ground Car park: Saturday the 8th Sept 18:00-20:00 Sunday the 9th Sept 06:00-07:15 I would strongly advise people to try and collect their packs on the Saturday if you can as it’ll save rushing around race morning, and could also mean you get an extra hour in bed Sunday morning, which is always a positive. If you’ve not had an email from DBmax or you entered before 3rd August and have not yet received your bib, please drop them a mail at [email protected] You will only get your Bib in the post, and your shirt will be available to collect at the finish line along with your medal I’m afraid that now the race is fixed and frozen, we can not make any name changes to entries, sorry Both the shirts* and medals are now with us and ready for you all: * the shirts are actually a pale sky blue, but the pic makes them look almost white On the day entries If you have friends that still want to race, but missed the online entries, we have around 100 on the day entries available These are priced at the same list price of £38.50 as we had for online entries, and are available from the registration tent at the following times: Sat 18:00-20:00 Sun 06:00-07:15 They are first come first served, and as our card machine does not work at the County Ground, where the registration tent is located, they are payable in cash only please Who to contact I’m sure many of you will have questions in the lead up to the race, so to make sure you’re pointed in the right direction, here are the contact details over the next few days Timing and registration queries – [email protected] Marshal and team queries – [email protected] General Enquiries – [email protected] Getting to the start and road closures As many of you will have seen, we now have maps up on our site with details on which roads are closed, and a diagram with the time the first runner is expected at any given point, and when the last runner will be through. You can find all that info here : https://newswindonhalf.co.uk/residents-and-spectators/road-closures/ The roads will close around 45-60minutes before the first runner is expected, but we will have a number of crossing points that will be open right up to 15minutes before the first runner is expected We will reopen roads behind the last runner at a rolling 4 hour cut off, and these will be reopened in sections The crossing points are as follows : Please can you make sure you leave plenty of time in the morning to get either dropped off at the start by the Country ground, or to get into town, get parked, and have enough time to get to the start area. If you have spectators coming into town later to see you finish, the best route in and out of town from the North or West for the duration of the race is through the Rodbourne Road as unlike last year, the runners will be using the service bridge at the rear of the Outlet, so the Rodbourne Road will be open in both directions throughout the race. If you have spectators coming from the East, Queens drive will be open for the duration from Coate Water to the Magic Roundabout as we will only close the lanes in the other direction. I can’t reiterate this enough, but please leave yourself plenty of time to get there in the morning as we cannot have the start line open for longer than a few minutes as we have a commitment to reopening roads that we cannot exceed. I’m conscious it is an early start, but should we run again next year, I think we’re in a stronger position to push the start time back an hour or so…. Right, that’s it for today’s email I will email again in a couple of days with some more information on the race, and we look forward to welcoming you all to our start line on Sunday Graeme, leigh and the Nationwide Swindon Half Team newswindonhalf.co.ukIs this the end for the Swindon Half Marathon ?
SHM2018 – July Newsletter
The following newsletter went out to all Swindon Half 2018 Competitors today :
Race date Sept 9th 2018
Good morning all, I hope this email finds everyone out enjoying training in the unusually good summer we’re having so far ? We’re just a few weeks out from this year’s race, so I wanted to drop all our competitors an email with a few bits of info in the run up to the race. Over the next 6 weeks, we’ll be emailing out regular updates on the race and info you’ll need for race day In this first instalment of the run up emails, I’ll cover the following : Running for Charity Race pack postage timing Training info Event Corporate Sponsorship Running for Charity Our 2017 race raised over £70k for local Swindon Charities, and even more for national charities that we don’t get the figures on. Now you have your entry, if you haven’t already done so, there’s nothing stopping you assigning a charity to your efforts and using all your hard work pounding the streets to raise some cash for a good cause. You don’t need to raise money just for the 15 Swindon Charities that we have associated with the race, and now you have your entry, you are free to do with it as you please and to raise money for any charity you like. The best way to get started is to head to Justgiving.com or a similar donation website and register yourself to the charity of your choice, and from there you can set up your page and share it with all your friends and work colleagues Race Pack Postage Over the coming weeks, you will get an email from a company called Dbmax. Dbmax are our timing partner for the event, but also take care of posting out your race bibs with the timing chips mounted to them. The Email will ask you to confirm your postage address and your age group allocation for the race. Your race pack will then arrive in the post to you around 7-10days out from the race, so there’s no need to register or do anything on race day, other than just turn up and run. Your package from DB max will also include your race day guide, with the Where’s and When’s along with info on parking etc. Training info Our training programs have been downloaded around 1600 times now, which is a big chunk of you, so we hope that you’ll all finding the free training plans useful. If you haven’t downloaded them to use, please head to the following link and have a look : https://newswindonhalf.co.uk/take-part/training/ Event Corporate Sponsorship Unfortunately, the Swindon half is not financially viable to run on entry fees alone, which is why we are always looking for Local or National Companies to get involved. Nationwide Building Society are our title sponsor, and fund around 50% of what is required in Corporate Funding, but we still have a host of other Sponsorship packages available for companies to get involved. Packages range from having your leaflets in the goody bag or your banner on the finish chute, right up to having an Aid station named after you and a presence on the course. Without corporate sponsors, this race might not have a future, as the cost of closing the roads and TM are increasing astronomically, so please get behind it if you can If you’re interested, please drop us an email at [email protected] Thanks Leigh, Graeme and the New Swindon Half teamPost race mail 2017
Post race email
Nationwide Swindon Half – Post race mail
Good morning all I hope everyone has just about dried out from yesterday, and those achy legs you’ve woken up with this morning feel like they were well earned ? I’m hoping that you’re all alert enough this morning to do some reading, as I’ll apologise in advance that this email is going to be a long. I’ve purposely made it all in text rather than pics, so at least if you’re at work today reading this, you can make it look like you’re working in case your boss walks past your desk, rather than being side tracked reading a race email 😉 In this email I’ll cover the following: How fast you went and how you looked doing it Feedback request & tweaks for 2018 Charities Extra Medals and shirts Traffic Conditions Going forward and the 2018 race How fast you went and how you looked doing it I get that this is the most important thing for you all that raced yesterday, so I’ll get this bit out the way first. You can find the full results here : http://dbmaxresults.co.uk/Results.aspx?CId=16421&RId=6172 And you can find your photos from the day here : https://www.marathon-photos.com/ If you have photo’s from the race you want to share, not just from the official photographer, but your own too, please share them to our Facebook page as we’d love to see them – www.facebook.com/newswindonhalf Feedback request & tweaks for 2018 This is the race for you all, the racers. I actually saw very little of the race yesterday, and for us to continue to grow and for this race to be perfect for everyone, we need you all that were out battling on the course yesterday to let us know what you loved and what you didn’t. This was our first stab at a Town Centre Half Marathon, and it appears we did a decent job of it from the feedback I’ve had from competitors so far, but need to understand all the little details and the things you liked and didn’t I’ll be the first person to put my hand in the air and admit there were teething problems in year one, and things that in following years will be much easier to get out earlier in terms of information and packs, as well as a few learning points for next year that only really became apparent yesterday as the race was running – Namely, a bigger finishing area running out into Canal Walk, Some directional arrows to the Bag collection, and a longer goody bag/medal collection area that can get people through more efficiently, better spaced bottle drops after the bins and few other slightly less obvious tweaks such as getting a park and ride in place, which we can easily sort in time for next year. I’ll talk about the traffic issues later in this mail, but am confident we can address those too. If you do one thing after this email, please just let me know what you thought as this is your race, and we’d love you to come back and bring all your friends too, as that’s the only way this race can reach it’s true potential and survive. Charities We partnered up with 15 Local Charities for this year’s race, and each of the charities were given 5 completely free slots. Hopefully, you all enjoyed the atmosphere stations they had out on the course yesterday too I know that a big chunk of you used your own slots to raise money for various other charities too, and we’d love to keep a running total of what people have raised and for which charity, as this information is great leverage for us to be able to go to the wider public in Swindon as well as the Council and various other bodies to get the support from them we need. If you did run for a charity yesterday, please can you let me know which one and how much you’ve raised, or are expecting to raise, and we’ll compile a spreadsheet and keep a running total. It might also be that we see a pattern of many people running for the same charity, and we can try and bring them into the race next year for some free slots in exchange for an atmosphere station like we did with the 15x 2017 partner charities. Extra Medals and shirts. As you might imagine, we have a lot of medals and shirts left over from yesterday. For you guys/girls that finished, you have family and partners etc that have been as much a part of your journey to this race as you have, and I’m sure you’d like to be able to recognise them putting up with you moaning about your training or the early morning runs by getting them a medal too. We also have a load of shirts left over, which we’re happy to dish out. In order to try and help promote our local park run, which does so much to introduce people to running, we’ll be at the Park Run in Lydiard Park this Saturday morning with boxes of shirts and medals which are free to take. It’s not fair to hand out extra medals to random people that didn’t race, so if you want another medal, please bring your current one with you to show you did finish, and we’ll happily give you another The shirts are free for anyone to take. Traffic conditions As Im sure many of you have seen and heard, traffic conditions yesterday were less than ideal, and created quite a few problems on the course. This was down to many different things, and all of the those various issues have some level of countermeasure that can be put in place for next year’s race. We genuinely believed that we had notified enough people of the race, that the wider public of Swindon would minimise road travel during the race yesterday, and that although traffic would be busy, we never saw the level of congestion and anger it caused coming in a million years. Over the last few months, we’ve been in the paper around 8 times, we’ve been on both Heart FM and BBC wiltshire multiple times with references to the closures and the date, and we put up 93 ‘Advance Warning’ Yellow signs around the course around 2-3 weeks out to let people know the roads would be closed for somewhere between 2-4 hours depending on how early in the course it was. However, it just wasn’t enough, and we’ve learnt from this to change the way we notify next year. There’s some tweaks to the planning we can make, and few slight changes to the course, that will make a small difference to the runners, but a massive difference to the flow of traffic (one example being hopefully having use of the Service road over the bridge behind the outlet rather than running over the road into the bus gate on Rodbourne road) We did have unforeseen problems on the course, and a handful of our Police officers on the junctions that were managing traffic were dragged away on an emergency, and we recognise that although this is something largely out of our control, we need a better contingency in case this happens again. I’ve given an apology to the people of Swindon that were so vocal in complaining though both the radio and newspaper, and we’re truly sorry for any of you that were caught up getting out of the town after the race or had spectators or family/friends caught up in it too. It’s all a learning curve for us, and please be rest assured that we’ll be better in this area next year. We’re not traffic management experts, and contracted in a private company for this purpose. They were sold to us as the best of the best, but there’s a lot of areas that can improve, and we definitely recognise this. We’ve always wanted this race to be the event that is not only amazing for runners, but is welcomed in by the locals too, and although there was a massive amount of support on the course from the majority of local residents, which I hope you all saw yesterday, there’s a very vocal minority that were certainly less than happy. To give some perspective, which has been lost in the myriad of social media posts, we closed the roads for just a few hours on one Sunday afternoon of the year. I’ve spoken with the organisers of Bath, Reading etc and many of the other large scale town/city centre events, and they have all said that people just get used to it coming, and plan their journeys according, much like the people do in Fairford/Down Ampney etc at the time of the airshow. Would can do more to notify them, and we’ll make sure we do in future years, and again, we’re sorry for any anger or delay caused. Going forward and the 2018 race We always went into this with a multi year plan, and we do hope that the race can grow and grow as year’s go on and we can cement it into the running calendar like other local races such as Bath, Reading and Bristol have. Not least as we’ve funded this with our own money. However, we need you all, as the running community to really get behind the race and push it forward. I’ve no doubt that some of the local councillors and MP’s, the race Sponsor and Police will have inundated with emails from the wider public that don’t want a race in Swindon town centre as it detracts from their right to drive around on a Sunday, so in order to add some balance, please can you all let them know how much you enjoyed it, and that Swindon needs something like this to put it on the map. Our town centre is, unfortunately, not used to it’s full potential, and on any normal Sunday afternoon would be almost entirely empty of shoppers or people seeing the wider Swindon area. Yesterday, the town centre was buzzing and the local shops had people queuing out the doors. We attracted something like 6,000 people into the town centre yesterday, and had 1000’s more come out their houses to support the runners around the course. Wood street and Old town were amazing from what I’ve seen on videos and people’s photo’s, and I’d really like the town to recognise this rather than just focussing on the vocal minority. The only way the Town will recognise this is if you, the runners, let them know, please let our sponsors, the MP’s and councillors and the Police know how much you liked and valued the race. Of course, this race also needs more sponsorship to move forward, so if you have local companies that want to benefit from the race, please get in touch as we have so many different ways in which we can work together. You may have hated it, and its your prerogative to let them know that too, but we sincerely hope we delivered something that’s starting to look exactly like the large scale running event the town needs to get bring exposure to the area, get people up off their sofa’s and running, and to give the runners, clubs and charities something that will benefit them all Next year’s race will have a date set in the coming months and entries will open on January 1st That’s it for my ramblings for this year’s event, but please let me know what you thought of the race and what you want to see in year’s to come. Hopefully you’ve all managed to stay away during my mails, and we look forward to seeing even more of you next year Cheers Graeme, Leigh and the Swindon Half teamNBSSHM17 August newsletter
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