“The Binder” that goes everywhere Anna Thill goes. Herein lies all Mankato Marathon details!
hills and hit highlights such as Minnesota State University here in town. They happen to have a whole row of parking lots, which can accommodate thousands and thousands of runners, so we thought that would be a great place to start the race. We chose parts of the course that would take the runners out in the country - 26 miles is quite a bit - and then bring them through town on our trail system, along the river and through the city center to the finish. We have them finishing right in front of the Civic Center here in the core of town. The Civic Center is owned by the City of Mankato, which is great because the city has been very supportive of this event. And it’s very important to have a place where medi- cal support can be set up to grab those runners who are in need of medical attention. At the Civic Center, there’s an area where the medical team can set up inside, close to showers, in case they need to cool down runners or so forth. The course was chosen with those factors in mind: where medical needs to be, what points of the community we want the runners to see and experience, avoiding the hills, and making sure it’s a great run according to our mara- thoners.
This year, the city decided to open up Riverfront Street, which is a major artery that runs right along the city center. That’s a pret- ty big deal because that allows us to expand the marathon to quite a few thousand people. Last year, the city wasn’t going to open up the streets for us because they weren’t sure what to expect, so we had to cap registration at 2,200 runners. Our goal at the beginning of this year is 5,000 runners. March 2011 We weren’t able to secure our presenting sponsor as soon as we would have liked, so we didn’t get out as early with our promotions, and that kind of hurt us. We had three to four companies compet- ing for the opportunity, and it was taking some time to negotiate between them. Their interest is certainly to support the event, but they want to get recognition as well, so we can’t go out with pro- motional materials until we have the key sponsors on board. Here it is March before we had our presenting sponsor on board, so that’s the first three months of the year that we’ve already lost in promo- tion. So one lesson learned right off the bat: get your sponsors on board as early as possible!
Something we did this year that we didn’t do our first year was
giving an option of a three-year sponsorship agreement, and a lot of our bigger sponsors came in for three years because they see this as something they want to stick with. We limited the cap on how much the sponsorship costs could go up, and they appreciate that because if our numbers double again for next year or go up another 2,000, they’re not having to pay the ratio for that difference. So that three-year agreement is going to help us, but we still have a couple of sponsors we need to secure early this year to make sure we can include them in promotion for the 2012 marathon. May/June 2011
A speaker series is an expectation that goes along with this kind of an event. In most marathons, people go to the expo, and they’ll do their pasta feed in conjunction with the speaker series. So they’ll go through the buffet to get their pasta dish, then go sit down and listen to a speaker talking about all kinds of different topics. We’re doing something different with our pasta feed, and our speaker series is taking place right in the middle of the expo. We’ve got people here talking about running with a pacer, nutrition to prepare for a marathon, running gear and the proper shoes, taking care of injuries, and so forth, and then we have Rebecca Meyer from Biggest Loser. She’s one of our highlights this year. She’s going to run our 10k, and that’s how we got her in the first place. She was looking for a Minnesota race, and she had her eyes on Mankato, which is cool! We also have Frank Shorter as our headliner. He’s an Olympic medalist from the United States, and he’s got a very, very interest- ing story about life growing up. He’s going to talk about training and intensive footwear, which is interesting. Some marathons have just a couple of really good keynote speakers, and we’re doing a speaker series with a bunch of local people talking about different things, and then we have a couple of bigger speakers like Rebecca and Frank. When you’re going after a national speaker, you have to get on their calendar months and months ahead of time… Would you like to read Anna’s journal from August through Octo- ber? Find these entries and more on the Winter 2011 page under the Resources tab at
MidwestMeetings.com.
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