Trouble Afoot!: The 2010 Palace Saloon 5K needs volunteers!

Wednesday, March 31, 2010

The 2010 Palace Saloon 5K needs volunteers!

Less than ten days remain till the morning of 10 April 2010 and the 36th annual Palace Saloon 5K. And Tallahassee's first and fastest five kilometer road race needs volunteers. Thanks and kudos to the folks who have already come aboard, but it takes a good many dedicated people to put on an event of this size, and the Palace needs more than a few more. Contact me at hwills@gmail.com if you're willing to help out. Here are a few areas of need:

Early packet pick-up and registration
In-person packet pick-up and pre-race registration at the Palace Saloon was much more popular than we expected last year. In fact, it was so popular that we were a bit understaffed. This year we'd like a few more people willing to smile at the public while taking entries and distributing T-shirts and race bibs on a weekday evening. The specific weekday evening, by the way, is Wednesday, 7 April 2010. We'll be doing it at the Palace Saloon again, 1303 Jackson Bluff Road. After all, they've been sponsoring this race for the last 36 years.

Race day registration and packet pick-up
This one requires the same ability to smile at the public while taking entries and distributing T-shirts, but from 6:45am to 8:00am out at Messer Field with the start of the race looming. Messer Field is located at the northwest corner of Dupree Street and Jackson Bluff Road.

Water table
Before you tell me that a five-kilometer race doesn't need a water table, you'll have to convince me that no one is going to run over thirty minutes and that it isn't going to be 90°F that morning. We'll need enough people at water table to serve over a thousand runners and then pick up all the cups that a thousand runners leave behind. I work a water table at the Tallahassee Marathon every year, and this one is going to be more hectic, but will only take about an hour.

Traffic Control
I always appreciate it when runners can go home and tell their friends, "I ran the Palace Saloon 5K this morning and I wasn't run over by a truck and killed or crippled for life!" Believe me, they don't owe that to the polite motorists of Tallahassee. It's all to the credit of the volunteer course marshals who staff the race course's intersections and discourage vehicles from interacting with the runners. Five kilometers is not a long way, but there are still a lot of intersections on this course, so we need a lot of course marshals.

Finish Line
Peg Griffin assures me that we need at least twenty people to make the finish line work. Actually, we need a few more than that, because this year we are adding a finisher's award for the first 1000 runners across the line. It should take about four people to hand those out. In our double-barreled finish chute we'll need strippers, we'll need stringers, and we'll need a couple of people to hand out finish cards like a blackjack dealer. Most importantly, we'll need pushers--people to keep runners moving through the chute.

If you'd like to help in any of these areas drop me a message at hwills@gmail.com. You can even specify a preference. And if you'd like to be the Official Volunteer Co-ordinator for the 2011 Palace Saloon 5K, then let's talk--but after the race.

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