Now working the second iteration of their Emergency Website, after a year of the original Emergency Website, the Saltwood Boxing Day Run (BDR) continues to be a study in how not to manage a running event, and yet it remains one of my favorite - if not favorite - races on the running calendar.

The race starts and finishes by the Saltwood village green, takes you on a three-mile spin around local farmland and woodland, and includes a number of steeplchase-like obstacles. Race HQ is the village pub, and it's four or five deep to get to the bar after the race. Love it!

The three years I have run the BDR, the timing has been something of a shambles and each year Stuart, the race director, seems to quite comically come up with new-fangled ways to mess up the results, stubbornly dismissing tried-and-tested methods of race timing.

In 2006, race organizers managed to list a majority of the 1,000+ finishers in the official results, but by no means all of them. They used the fairly orthodox finishing chute method, but rather than rip tabs from bibs, there was a guy with a ratty notebook at the end of the chute scribbling numbers as they walked past him. Needless to say, many numbers failed to make their way into the notebook and, by extension, the official results.

For the 2007 race, the organizers chose to do away with the ratty notebook, deciding instead to radio finisher numbers to Stuart in Nottingham (hundreds of miles away) as they crossed the finish line. This method was not a success, and apparently the back-up video of the finish line was a disaster too. The results were maybe 70% complete. And then there was last year: the bullhorn fiasco.

The finish line chute was done away with - why, I don't know - and race numbers were bullhorned to somebody somewhere (maybe Stuart in Nottingham) as finishers crossed the line. Inevitably, as the hordes started filing through, the bullhorn operator and scribe quickly became overwhelmed and only a scattershot of finishers were captured in the results - maybe a 50% success rate. Again, the back-up finish-line video was a failure.


And this year? Well, the newest results-capturing system has recently been expounded upon through the (second emergency) race website: "We are using bar codes this year! We didn't want to revert to a slow funnel, even though it has been the most reliable system in the past."

Brilliant!! Why revert to your most reliable system when you can try something completely new and hatstand instead? I can't wait to see how the bar-code system will work. Will there be a guy with a bar-code scanner scanning us as we cross the line, or will we be picked up and thrust across a grocery store checkout as we finish? I'm almost as excited to find out how this unique system will work as I am to get to Saltwood to toe the line for the fourth annual Clark and friends Boxing Day outing in the 35th running of the BDR.

At the end of the day, despite the fact that we all go out and run it as hard as we can, the race is not really about the race, it's about getting out with family and friends on bloated Xmas stomachs to romp around the great British countryside. In fact, the organizers, true to the history of the event, refuse to call it a race, referring to it simply as a 'run'.

An aside on the registration procedure: You email Stuart your details and he emails you a Word doc attachment of your race number with instructions to print and "plasticize" it - the first year we received these instructions there was much discussion (and chortling) about how best to plasticize our numbers. Stuart then requests payment be put in the mail, relying on the honesty of the British public to follow through with ex post facto payment. I would imagine that the payment rate is about as successful as the various timing systems - patchy, at best.


If you ever find yourself in or around Kent on the day after Christmas, don't miss out on this gem!