Ultramarathon and Trail Running Daily News, Thurs, Jan 19

Probably the most common question ultramarathon and trail running coaches get: What should my training look like if I run five days each week? Coach David is on it.

Jeff’s race report from his Golden Ticket win at Bandera.

Here’s a great story about Dave Odell, a guy who ran 50 miles around a track for his 50th birthday (and for charity), and who sounds like he loves every single bit of this wacky community.

And here are some trail tips for women with Inov-8 athlete Jasmin Paris.

Bryon’s picks for the best new trail shoes from Winter OR.

Canadian record holder for the marathon discusses body image and sexualization of female runners.

Beer. Yoga. Australia wins!

Busted already for EPO, this anti-doping advocate is back to racing–and winning–ultras. Article in en espanol, but here’s some background on him in English.

it came about as a solution to a set of problems raised by the needs of a reformed penal system that wanted to punish prisoners heart and soul without actually killing them.

—Happy 200th Birthday, Treadmill!

Looks like there’s a dustup going on between a few cool races and ultrasignup. I sure hope it’s just a big misunderstanding.

Big congrats to URP co-host Sarah Lavender Smith for winning the RunUltra Blogger Award!

Have you tried the SFuels bars yet? Here’s an update: The company had planned on having enough to give away for a few months, but…the demand from URP was ginormous and they blew through all 250 sample packs in the first day. So, they announced an additional 250 sample packs that they could distribute, then blew out of those in the first week. So…If you’d still like to get access to a sample pack free of charge, then click here (NEW LINK), type the discount code at the Spike-FREE shop, pay small shipping fee….and your sample pack will be on its way to you. Ta-da!

With the Iditarod Trail Invitational about a month away, Alaska’s temps are hovering around 50 damn degrees below zero.

Ladies! Pay attention to these six risk factors for stress fractures.

And hey ladies, I’m trying to give away a pair of womens shoes to my Patreon supporters, but can’t seem to find a female with the right size. Yeah, we’re playing Cinderella over here!

25 Responses to "Ultramarathon and Trail Running Daily News, Thurs, Jan 19"

SW says:

January 19, 2017 at 6:40 am

I’m not surprised that a RD is having issues with Ultrasignup. They dared to get feedback from customers and make improvements based on it. Ultrasignup doesn’t feel the need to listen to customers or make improvements and they (he) can be very retaliatory to Trump-like level when questioned. I have personal experience with this

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1. eric schranz says:
  
  January 19, 2017 at 6:54 am
  
  I’m not an RD so don’t have experience, but I sure hope there’s an easy answer and fix to this. TrailFest sounds like a rad event.
  
  Reply
2. MDSM says:
  
  January 19, 2017 at 9:07 am
  
  It’s good thing. You’ll get better customer service from runsignup. My ultrasignup account has been hosed up for years. Three concerted attempts to fix the mess have failed. They blew me off when I approached them directly. Two attempts through RD’s resulted in a partial fix with incorrect information still there AND additional CRAZY information, e.g. the stray, corrected result has me as over 100 years old. They are a perfect case study in what happens to customer service when there is a perceived monopoly. I, too, am aware of extreme retaliatory behavior on the part of ultrasignup when anyone dares to criticize them or question their service = too much power in the hands of two (is it still just two) people.
  
  Reply
  1. Mark Gilligan says:
    
    January 19, 2017 at 3:50 pm
    
    Michael,
    
    I checked your results page and it looks pretty clean:
    
    https://ultrasignup.com/results_participant.aspx?fname=Michael&lname=Shelly-Moody
    
    I can assure you we do not ignore request or purposely mess with people by jacking up their results. If you experienced results showing odd ages, this is likely from a race that submitted results without ages. We do have algorithms to try and find a match, but sometimes the data is submitted with a wrong age and that will mess up your results. This is a very giant task and we do our best to help. One other source of issue is your hyphenated name. Some results submitted to us decide to leave off the last part of your name. These are issues that cause plenty of cleanup on our end. Simply submit a request from your results page and it is added to our queue and usually resolved within a day or two.
    
    Reply
3. Jonathan Pascual says:
  
  January 19, 2017 at 12:40 pm
  
  Agreed with the RD’s description of “hostile” as a response from Ultrasignup. I too am a recipient of this hostility. I do not need an aggressive response from the person at Ultrasignup who definitely need a lesson on customer service.
  
  Per their directions, if RD’s do not upload results, runners can do the uploading. The directions were very simple and I was successful in a previous upload. In an email response for another upload, I was accused of making up a race and a race distance of said race.
  
  It only takes one mistake from a company and I’m taking my money somewhere else. RD’s have multiple ways to get runners signed up for a race such as their own online registration and cashier’s check. It’s just running. It’s easy to drop hostile companies such as Ultrasignup.
  
  Reply
  1. Scotty Kummer says:
    
    January 19, 2017 at 1:04 pm
    
    I’ve had nothing but great interactions with ultrasignup and love the service. So this seems like it might be more of a personal dispute than professional.
    
    Reply
  2. Mark Gilligan says:
    
    January 19, 2017 at 4:16 pm
    
    Jonathan,
    
    I re-read the thread that we saved, and can see how Bill’s response may have been short and not very fuzzy. Bill answers tons of emails daily and often responds as quick as possible. We both need to work on our speed replies.
    
    However, your response to his less than warm reply is shameful. Do you tell aid station helpers to “shove it up your a## and f you”? No one should ever be verbally abused like that.
    
    Reply
    1. Jonathan Pascual says:
      
      January 20, 2017 at 11:49 am
      
      The irate response was prompted by the reply from your company. I have no regrets there. I am no longer a customer so we can be equally satisfied of being rid of each other.
      
      Reply
Teresa Smith says:

January 19, 2017 at 7:49 am

Eric, Can you spill the shoe size? There’s nothing more tempting to a runner than shoes! (Okay – maybe a free race entry.)

Reply
1. eric schranz says:
  
  January 19, 2017 at 7:51 am
  
  Ha! No way! I want them going to someone with the right size AND I’m married and know what some women will do to get their feet into shoes. My wife wears an 8. Unless the shoes are cute enough, then she could wear a 5! (And they’re not actually shoes….they’re North Face slippers. 😉 )
  
  Reply
  1. Teresa Smith says:
    
    January 19, 2017 at 8:11 am
    
    Interesting…I didn’t know North Face made slippers. That’s what I missed with the Cinderella reference.
    
    Reply
Joseph says:

January 19, 2017 at 8:36 am

I am an RD of a few events, and have had no real problem with Ultra SignUp myself. I find them responsive and helpful. I have also run one of the Grand Circle races, and aside from the horrible trail marking (that got about 40 or so of us lost), I had several other issues that I felt (again, as an RD) were easy fixes. I wasn’t necessarily “wow’ed” with their events. I can’t speak to the RD of that event at all, since he didn’t really talk to any of the participants – at the pre-race, start or finish. Maybe it’s a misunderstanding, but I feel like there is quite possibly 2 sides to this story and would be curious to hear what Ultra SignUp’s reasons were.

Reply
francois says:

January 19, 2017 at 9:46 am

ah, but did he take a pledge? ok I’ll show myself out 🙂Reference

Reply
1. eric schranz says:
  
  January 19, 2017 at 10:07 am
  
  Heh. A bit too long ago for that. It’s guys like this bozo who make us look at everyone with a skeptical and accusatory eye. Why are they so publicly against PEDs? What are they hiding? Is this just a front, a ruse?
  
  Reply
  1. francois says:
    
    January 19, 2017 at 10:25 am
    
    Word. But we live in a word where the louder guy gets heard and believed, whatever bullshit is being told (to reference your favorite topic the Donald), so the sketchier you’re at the back, the cleaner you want to look at the front – though that’s obviously not an absolute rule and certainly not a rule the other way around. After all, Lance was the most tested athlete in the world, and we all knew what it meant then and what it means now.
    Pledges and testing are not foolproof and only part of a process, and there’s much work to do to clean things up. Never rest!
    
    Reply
Mike ;) says:

January 19, 2017 at 11:40 am

Let’s not be overly dramatic about the weather in Alaska. The -50s were in the interior of the state, which are much colder. In McGrath, one of the major towns along the Iditarod Trail, the high today is a balmy -23F.

Reply
1. eric schranz says:
  
  January 19, 2017 at 12:02 pm
  
  Yeah, -23 sounds nice and warm! (You people are crazy.)
  
  Reply
Rich says:

January 19, 2017 at 11:59 am

yes and impressived so farReference

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Gerell says:

January 19, 2017 at 1:39 pm

I was kicked off Ultra signup because I simply asked them why they changed their website and was blasted by them from the get go….True story..and was told I could make a donation to the site to get my results back up. Showed email exchange to many friends, some respected runners and they could not believe what the master mind there at Ultra Signup wrote to me. Now I could care less to have my results up…silly me.

Reply
Mark Gilligan says:

January 19, 2017 at 3:35 pm

I will do my best to address a few of the issues that were brought up in previous comments.
First, I started Ultrasignup 8 years ago, as a hobby. I realized at the time that there was no place trail and ultrarunners could see entrants lists for upcoming events or results. In fact, ultra and trail running was always kicked to the side in favor of large road events by all the online registration players (not really much different now). I started the site not as a business, but as a way to add back to the sport and build something fun and cool that could be enjoyed by members of our sport. I started by organizing the hundreds of thousands of historical results from race websites, pdf documents, and other sources. I had no intention to build a registration system or to turn the site into a for profit business. I was very busy running my own software company and really just wanted to build a side site for fun.
As the popularity of the results grew and I had a few directors approach me to start a registration site, I built that piece of the website. That took a lot of my free time so another runner, Bill Carr, offered to volunteer his free time to help out on the results side. There were no armored truck loads of cash being made and we both were working around the clock. We knew that once we got caught up loading historical results, we could simply maintain new results. Boy, were we wrong. Today, we receive hundreds of emails and results requests, DAILY. We do our best to correct misspellings and bad data, we sit at the dinner table at night fixing garbage data and correcting people’s names. The data is only as good as the data being loaded up by the directors, runners and timers. That said, we try to answer every customer service request within 15 minutes.
Now, as you can imagine, people sitting behind a computer are ruthless and uninhibited in the things they write online. UltraSignup unfortunately gets our share of these comments. However, unlike most corporations that run giant websites, when you click send, your message goes directly to the people who have invested 8 years building the FREE website you are using. Bill and I have a simply rule that is line with how directors respond to runners who are rude to volunteers, we simply revoke access to their results. We realize, you can get away with writing rude and nasty things to other websites you use, but our sport it better than that and we do not tolerate it.
Do we like constructive criticism? Absolutely, that is how we have conceived the majority of our features. If you “have personal experiences” with retaliatory behavior from us, we likely have a full transcript of your comments and could give you some advice on how to treat people that are providing a free service to you.
I will briefly address the unfortunate Grand Circle situation. Online registration is a high risk business that involves the inflows and outflows of large amounts of money. UltraSignup assumes a lot of risk when we take in credit card funds and pay them in advance of a service being performed. When it was discovered that GC had made that decision to move their business, we had to stop accepting registrations immediately. We did not do this out of spite, we offered to quickly help facilitate the move. It was our understanding that the move was already in play. Unfortunately, Matt Gunn who wrote the blog on their site has been MIA for 2 years, so it was very surprising to see his writeup. It is our understanding that the races were sold to a giant road running event company.
Please feel free to contact me [email protected] directly if you ever feel we are not being fair. It is our intention to keep building a fun a great resource for our sport and never want to give the impression that we do not care.

Reply
1. Joel says:
  
  January 19, 2017 at 9:33 pm
  
  I have no dog in this fight/discussion whatsoever, but I’m a little confused about the comments regarding Ultrasignup being a FREE website? I assume you’re just referring to the free access of past race results? Given the sometimes considerable processing fees one pays on top of race entry, am I wrong that Ultrasignup makes money?
  
  Reply
  1. Mark Gilligan says:
    
    January 20, 2017 at 3:48 am
    
    Ultrasignup is two websites in one. Registration and results. On the registration side, fees are paid to cover credit card processing and our costs. Processing cards is a commodity type of service with many companies competing to offer the lowest price possible. We are one of the cheapest processors and will meet or beat anyone.
    
    However, the above comments are regarding results. The site was started as a results site and we have never charged to use it, nor do we have ads to fund it. It is for the community to enjoy.
    
    Reply
    1. Joel says:
      
      January 20, 2017 at 6:46 am
      
      Thanks for clarifying Mark.
      
      Reply
2. Gerell says:
  
  January 23, 2017 at 9:09 am
  
  Well, I can only comment on things that happen to me personally, and you all were not professional in any way towards me. You had the nerve to call me lazy that I could not take the time to try and navigate your new website…told me that I could pay you( you called it a “donation”) to get my results back up. Not to mention that you felt like I needed to be penalized for asking a simple question to you by taking my results off…How mature is that? Seriously…I have no desire to have my results be put back up, and am not surprised that other people have had bad experiences with you. You need to take these constructive comments and try and be more professional. I showed many people our previous email exchanges and not one, one saw your side of things. I’m done on this topic and wish you all the best.
  
  Gerell
  
  Reply
Andrew says:

January 26, 2017 at 11:54 am

I’m a week behind but looks like this is a dead link.Reference

Reply

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