Captain’s Blog: Commitments

Hopefully you’re now looking at a list of committed runners. Maybe even a nearly-full roster that you can imagine completing 200 miles with. And hopefully you’ve also been maintaining another list. Let’s call them the Not Nos: those many, many folks who you approached weeks ago and they said… not no. Well, now’s the time to give them a firm nudge to see if they’re in or out.

I’m in the process of putting two squads together—one for Massachusetts in May and one for New Hampshire, in September. My New Hampshire list is littered with semi-commitments and not-nos. I keep nudging them, but to no avail. September remains too far in the future. The Massachusetts list, thankfully, has shaped up nicely. In the past couple weeks I circled back to a few people who had expressed some interest (very, very modest interest in certain cases…) and was pleasantly surprised when they jumped at the chance to take a spot on the team. The couple that was “tentatively, stupidly, maybely in” back in January is definitely in now, as are several other. With 11 commitments, we’ve almost got a complete squad—and some time left to round it up to an even dozen.

With March fast-approaching, hopefully a May race now seems real enough to your prospective recruits that they’ll be inspired to commit. There’s also still a good amount of time for new recruits to focus their training and enter May ready to roll. If they wait too much longer, that won’t be the case—so see how many firm commitments you can get before the calendar turns over to a new month. (And remember, if you want to post a public call for runners, RTB’s message board is a good place to start.)

And captains—are there any topics you’d like to see covered in this space, or questions you’d like answered? Let me know in the comments or on Facebook, and I’ll try to address them in future posts.