Quote:
Originally Posted by Poker Clif
A footrace can go a lot of different ways. It can be a 50 local people or have thousands of runners (think Boston Marathon.) People who know how to organize races can adapt to different situations.
There’s a good comparison to poker tournaments. Hosting one for 50 local people shouldn’t be too difficult right now especially if you’re flexible. But that number of runners means for example that you won’t be on public roads.
The Boston Marathon already postponed their 2021 race to the Fall, same as all other Super6 marathons. There’s so much time and money going into organizing that race that you need several months to organize it. Same as the WSOP. They can’t just announce a 50+ event series 6 weeks ahead of time. At least not if you want to have a decent number of attendants. IIRC, roughly 30% of Boston Marathon runners are from the Northeast, 40% from the rest of the US and 30% international. That’s pretty comparable to the WSOP.
I think I already posted what the tournament director of our largest local marathon told me in the late summer: Large running races are off right now because people don’t sign up for them. Not because organizers wouldn’t be allowed to host them. For a marathon in an urban area, you need at least ~2k people signed up for it a couple months in advance just to make sure you can pay for security/police. If you don’t get to that number, your race is off.