Snowdonia Responds

Race director of Snowdonia by UTMB steps up to the Instagram hot seat to explain the situation:

After months of discussions with local authorities and landowners, environmental protections in some sensitive areas mean the course cannot follow all of its historic sections this year. 

We’re currently working on an updated route of the UTS 100K to find the best possible balance between protecting our environment and delivering the Alpine-scale mountain experience you expect. We’ll keep you informed very soon.

I kind of thought that might be the reason for the changes. Could UTMB have handled this differently? Is this another communication ‘own goal’? Maybe, probably.

But UTMB is also in a complete ‘damned if I do, damned if I don’t’ situation here. Trail running is growing, demand for their events is at an all time high, races, especially the historic ones, sell out quickly. If they keep bib numbers at previous levels and not grow their events then folks complaint that it’s impossible to get into their races and get stones. If they keep bib numbers for their current races and buy more races to meet the demand, then folks complaint about monopolies. If they try to increase bib numbers to accommodate the demand then reroutes are necessary in certain situations to protect the environment. From my perspective, as a race director and close watcher of how UTMB operates their events all across the globe the most sensible position is to stay flexible and assume reroutes are a high possibility and happen on a regular basis. Don’t like that? Tough luck. And sure, you can tell me to fuck off here, but I do believe that UTMB’s perspective here is that the only way to avoid lottery upon lottery is to keep the race routes fluid and always sign up with the understanding that the race you sign up for might not have a finalized course until a couple of weeks before race day. Is that great for the runner? Probably not, but that’s a level of flexibility the organization expects from you, just like they expect you to be ready for any weather conditions.