Buck Fifty Team Captain THINKTANK: Phase Three
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That’s a good question in the picture above right?!
(150 miles in 24 hours on trails, during the night, in crappy weather, no sleep, etc.)
I’m sharing my thoughts and learnings from being a team captain in a 24 hour road race to better help myself and you understand what it takes to build ideas into passion projects and decide which ones might make sense to be turned into side hustles and eventually businesses!
All through the power of digital marketing and connecting with people.
Today’s post is about the week of prep for the Buck Fifty Race! I’ll be back later this week for the actual race itself and the outcome of course!
What does week of prep look like?
- Constant communication with your team and the race directors. To put on an event like this or to participate and keep your team well informed the week of requires ongoing and open communication. It’s a good trait for any passion project. As events get closer the needs ramp up!
- Packing and logistics. Picking up the 15 person passenger van from Enterprise, double checking the campsite reservation is in tact, packing race and downtime clothes, and every healthy snack known to man! You name it, it happened.
- Organization of routes. We put together and brought a 100 page binder with two copies of every single person’s race leg. We wanted to have one in the van and one on the runner during their leg. Some legs were in the middle of the night on trails by themselves, we needed to be ready for any and everything!
- An ability to be up for whatever outside factors throw your way! We had cold and wet weather the few days leading up to the event. So wet and so cold in fact that some might have considered backing out if we hadn’t all committed so much as a team. You can’t get slowed down by what you can’t control (weather, traffic, etc.) It reminds me of the age old saying my friend Tracy Austin reminds me of “10% of life is what happens to you and 90% is how you react to it.”
I could go on forever but I hope this gives you a snapshot of what we were doing leading up to race day.
How does digital marketing play a role?
- I was able to find answers to my teammates questions by talking to the race director on twitter and other past road racers on social media. Not possible a few years ago!
- Google Maps helped tremendously and while this doesn’t seem like digital marketing it is resource that can help you grow ideas and passion projects so I would say YES!
- Blogs and other resource articles gave me some great DO’s and DONT’s leading up to race day. For instance raisins have just as much good energy in them as those gels and shots that are typically distributed at races but raisins of none of the unnatural sugars in them. I packed a raisin farm for race day! I learned that from a blogger who has run races like this.
Race week was hectic yet fun. The build up is incredible and the race director Dave told me he got little to no sleep getting everything ready, yet he wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world!
My key takeaways are to rely not just on yourself but your whole team (everyone on my team pitched in even though I was captain) and to let people take ownership (Dave said his volunteers did that and alleviated so much stress from him.)
More on his volunteers in the next post!
My other key takeaway is to explore possibilities and communicate with people instead of getting stressed, complaining, and thinking everything is a problem.
Follow your passions and see what can be possible. That’s all for now, I’ll be back Thursday with the actual race THINKTANK blog post!
Until then reach out at mike@MarketingFunWithMike.com if you need support on your own THINKTANK projects and sign up for Bi Monthly Videos HERE.
Thanks for reading!
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Mike