Since our mission, in part, is to work to protect our special outdoor places, we believe it’s important, critical actually, to do our part to lessen our own footprint. In the outdoor event world, especially where those events are often located in the mountains, away from major population centers, that’s not always easy. But we try. We’re also always trying to improve, so if any of you reading this have ideas that can help us do better, drop us a note and let us know how we can improve. We’d appreciate that. Here’s a few things we do:
1) Power generation. These days we try to power all of our event needs with rechargeable solar generators. Thanks to our partner ECOFLOW, we’re darn near there. They’ve donated a massive 2kH generator, a pair of solar panels, a backup battery, and a heating/cooling unit so that we can provide what our athletes need. Thanks to them we can power lights, heat, comms, timing systems, Starlink, and more, even in winter, for our overnight event. A vast improvement - in so many ways - over the loud, stinky and finicky gas generator we used to have to rent.
2) Cup-free. We decided early on to not provide disposable cups for any of our events, instead encouraging our runners to provide their own cups/bottles for their on-course hydration. Thankfully, our runners, great group that they are, were more than up to that request. And now, thanks to our new partner, Hydrapak, we are able to offer every single one of our runners an easy to carry reusable cup. It’s just brilliant. Even at our race HQ our runners use reusable stainless steel cups and simple and sturdy wheatstraw plates for their in-race and post-race snacks. These are simply washed and reused - no waste at all.
3) Bulk food. Rather than buy single serving packets/bags or food (like pretzels, chips, etc.) we use only bulk packs to limit our event waste. Of course, we buy locally to eliminate the carbon costs of shipping. Ultimately, we have only one small bag of trash for a 50K trail race. Likewise, we utilize only reusable 5 gallon water jugs for our hydration needs. Once emptied these can simple be returned and refilled. We collect and compost all our food waste, along with other compostable items.
4) Carpool and offsets. We encourage our runners to carpool to our events and create and share with them a shareable carpool document. We know we have work to do on this front: it’s hard to get people in such a car-centric world to abandon the freedom to come and go at will. Understandable. In order to make that option more doable, we incentivize carpooling by offering all who carpool free entry into the park where our events are held, usually a $10 cost. Money talks. We also include the option of offsetting personal travel to and from each of our events - the offset cost, just a few bucks, is based on the average carbon released for the typical roundtrip to and from the event.
5) Event Swag. We also offer our participants the option of not taking the official race swag (usually a hat in our case) and receiving a discounted race fee. We hear too often about the unwanted/unused Ts or medals or hats, and we incentivize the idea of not taking what you don’t want or need.
6) No medals. While we know and appreciate that many runners do want the official race medal, we’ve heard too many times how unnecessary these are. And when you look at the cost, in terms of time, money and energy consumption, it really doesn’t make much sense. Not for us anyway.
7) Course marking. We utilize only reuseable event marking materials so that our arrows, flags, signs, etc. can be used over and over, only rarely, and at the end of a long “marking” life, ending up in a landfill.
8) Pre-race educational events. Because each of our events is focused on a particular/specific sustainability issue (clean air, public lands and water) we host pre-race events at outdoor shops and running stores to educate us and our runners about the issue and, most importantly, what each of us can do to be part of a solution.
9) Separate containers for trash, recycle and compost. We provide clearly marked containers for our runners to dispose of their “trash”, and have a volunteer there to ensure things go in the right container.
10) Pre-Race loads and Marking. To minimize the number of trips we end up making to our event locations, we rent/borrow a van that can carry virtually all of our events needs in a single trip. We burn less gas, drive less, and get the goods where they need to be. It’s money well spent, in our opinion.
As noted, it’s a work in progress, and constantly evolving. But it’s important.