The Shame of Volunteering for Ironman
I first volunteered for Ironman UK in 2001 at the Llanberis race. I still have the shirt. I’d been racing triathlons for a few years by then. I knew how shambolic races could be behind the scenes and wanted to help. My 7-year old son and I camped outside of town, biked-in and it was indeed a shambles, mostly through poor planning.
I didn’t have much to do with Ironman for another 5-years and mostly stuck to short-course racing.
I did though volunteer and run key positions in other races. I loved working for John Lunt’s Human Race with Jasmine Flatters and the rest of the crew. I ran the swim practices and course at a few ITU World Championship races; was part of the team for the Commonwealth Games triathlon in Salford, where I notably got a a jammed tram back to the town center squashed in with “his heinous” ITU President Les McDonald. John Lunt used to let me race in the Windsor Sprint races and I’d be in charge of the bike dismount line for the Pro/Elite race at the same time.
In 2003 started organizing races for our club, and created a couple of races from the ground-up, including designing/mapping out the bike/run routes, both of these still exist today some 15-years on.
In 2006, I raced the original Disney Half-Ironman in Orlando. Seemed to go OK from my perspective except they ran out of cups on the run course in 96F temperatures. I did another local half distance non-ironman race which was sold to Ironman the following year, I DNF’d on the run as I remember, it was boiling hot and I was going to be nowhere near my PB, and quit.
The following year the race was switched to a split transition and you had to take a bus to the start. From what I heard it was chaos, delayed start, people walking on unlight country roads.
I made a mock-up of the transit route, timed buses loading at a local transit statin, watched what caused delays, made mini-paper buses and laid out the buses and tried to estimate how long it would take. Turns out my plan using the same number of buses they had was marginally quicker than it took them because of the delay of people walking on the roads in the dark.
I made my pitch and got the “job”, Transportation Captain. My terms, double the number of school buses and a much larger parallel loading zone, a cop by the gate and absolutely no one walking or driving on the road from T2 to T1 and the swim start. I was though a volunteer. I volunteered in the race set-up and then on race day from 4am-3pm’ish for 5-years with no discernable delay getting people to the race start; getting spectators back had its own challenges.
In 2011, 2013 I volunteered for the ITU World Championships in London, running the south part of the bike course in the park. Sometime around 2017 I started running VIP Services for Ironman at local full and 70.3 races, through until the full got cancelled and COVID stopped the 70.3, when it came back they never called or emailed, why would I?
Ironman was sold, bought, sold and bought again and is now variously part of a billion dollar sports group.
What About The Shame?
I’ve helped out at local races sporadically since. You can find me most weeks of the summer out in a kayak as water safety for the local splash/dash aka stroke/stride races. I helped out last year on the run course for a local school volunteer aid station. It went OK I think, although it’s a long day out in the sun.
This year I won’t be in town for race day. However, I’ve been watching the coach’s emails and it reminded me why it is people should think again about Ironman.
Watching a high school teacher plead multiple times to borrow 9-10 “easy-ups” to run an aid station at an Ironman race.
They are running the aid station to raise funds for the school’s sports program. The twenty or so kids that volunteer will be too young to work legally. They are required to work 4-6 hour shifts. For that, they school team gets a grant payment from the Ironman Foundation. Alongside the kids will be 6-8 adults including the coaches.
For completing their aid station satisfactorily, they’ll receive a grant that barely exceeds the minimum wage payment for the kids. The grant comes from the Ironman Foundation, a non-taxable organization. They get their money mostly from Ironman itself which “donates” the money tax free to the foundation. The money they donate comes off their top-line which is then subject to tax after all the other business expenses.
Running races is expensive, be kind to volunteers, it’s a job most people won’t do, especially if they knew how little money it was worth. Usually though you get as many gels as you need.