It’s time to get things started again with Ragnar 2013. It feels like we just finished the last one, but our first group training run is next month! It was nice to have the summer off though. It’s a lot harder to schedule workouts and make Saturday long runs when you have vacations and yard work to fit into your schedule. But now that school has started and the weather is cooling, it’s time to get things going again.

Competition

So, what’s on tap for this next season? As successful as the last season was, I think there is still plenty of room for growth. Last year, our most productive fundraising month was right before we picked our routes.  This was largely due to the fact that we pick which leg we run based on how much fundraising each person has done.  We raised around $12,000 in about a months time. All of the rest of the nine months only generated $5,000.  It’s amazing how motivating the thought of 1600 feet of elevation gain in 4 miles can be.  In order to keep up the fundraising pace, I’m trying to get a team started at ARUP, another company that works in the same field as Myriad and is right across the street. Hopefully, this will give us a little friendly competition and give people something to work towards after routes are selected.

Food Truck

I think there is a lot of potential with the food truck idea we did last year too. In brief, we got a local food truck to donate 20% of the proceeds from lunch to our cause. In exchange, our team promoted the event and got as many people as possible to show up. The event was successful in a lot of aspects. We had a big turnout from Myriad and completely saturated the output of the vendor for a full two hours. I don’t think they expected us to have that many people, as they started to run out of food. As good as it went, there’s still a lot of improvement that could come from this event. While it was great to have so many people, the line was very long. Personally, it took me over 30 minutes to get my lunch, and I think it took some people quite a bit longer, maybe even close to an hour. I saw a few people stop by that weren’t from Myriad, look at the line, and then get on their phone and walk away. I can only assume that they were telling their friends not to come because the wait was too long.

What I’d like to do to get around this is to get a few more food trucks on site, especially ones that have a big social media presence. Getting the Chow Truck would be great. They have a lot of followers on Twitter and could probably get some people to show up that aren’t from research park. The event also needs to earn more money, as last years event only earned $100. In comparison, another group sells pancakes and snow cones and generates $400 from each product. The food trucks should be able to pull in a lot more than $100 if it’s done right, my goal is to get closer to $500 this time around. I think this could be done with another 3-4 trucks. The location of the event might be a little bit more of a challenge, as we could probably only fit another one or two more trucks here at Myriad.

Our first team meeting is going to be at the beginning of October. I’m excited to see how many people show interest this year. I’m cautiously optimistic that there might be enough interest to get three teams this year. I’m going to open the event to participants outside of the Salt Lake Campus, as I have received emails from employees in Texas and New York that have expressed interest in participating.

No matter what, we are going to run a great team and make sure that everybody has a good time.