Crowded road-race market puts the squeeze on nonprofits

It all started with an out-and-back course from Wichita West High School to O.J. Watson Park.

Patrick Blanchard remembers running in one of the first organized road races in Wichita in 1975.

It was simple. About 40 people ran a course down the bike path to the park and back, while a couple stood at the finish line and hand-recorded runners’ times as they came in.

No roads were blocked off, there were no water stations, and if you got lost, it was your own tough luck.

“We were just lowly guys running on the roads ourselves on Saturday and Sunday mornings in a group,” said Blanchard, who now works as an attorney in Wichita. “Those were just great times, some of the best times of my life.”

The number of road races in Wichita – and across the nation – has exploded since those early days.

More races are being held now than ever before, and the number of runners participating in those races peaked in 2013, national statistics show.

In 2014, both races and runners dipped 1 percent, according to Running USA, an online trade association for the running industry.

The dip in participation is corroborated anecdotally by organizers of local runs, who say that the plethora of events held every weekend are spreading available runners too thin across multiple events.

So local nonprofits, many of which rely heavily on funds raised from their runs, are having to get creative or risk being run out of town.

“Across the board, even the Glow Runs, the social runs, the Mustache Dashes, everything is shrinking,” said Troy Fitzgerald, owner of the KC Running Company. “We’ve reached a saturation point, and most people like to say it’s because of all these Glow Runs, these Color Runs, these types of races.

“That is part of it, but since I started this business eight years ago, I would say it’s the (200, 300) percent increase in charity runs.”

New ‘phase’ of road races

Clark Ensz, who organized races in the Wichita area from the 1970s until his retirement last year, has witnessed the evolution of the road race.

He says runners today are in the midst of the “third phase” of road races.

During the first phase, which he dates around the 1970s and ’80s, road races were focused mainly on athleticism and the competition, “pretty serious running stuff.”

In the second phase, from the 1990s to early 2000s, the charity race boomed in popularity.

The third phase, Ensz says, has come about in the past few years. In it, the focus is on how entertaining a run will be, as opposed to its running merits.

“When people are looking at four or five events on a weekend, it appears to me that they’re making their decisions based on the entertainment value as to where they’re going to go,” he said. “That could be music, it could be food – just some unique aspect of the event.

“Certainly when we started putting on running events, we would have never foreseen what was going to happen 30 some years later.”

In 1990, roughly 4.7 million people finished races, according to Running USA’s 2015 State of the Sport report, released Monday. In 2014, that number had ballooned to 18.75 million, a growth rate of roughly 300 percent.

The report measures the number of runners who have crossed finish lines because “that is the most pure, conservative number we can get to,” said Rich Harshbarger, CEO of Running USA. If people ran more than one event in the year, they were counted every time they crossed a finish line.

“There are people who register and don’t start; there are people who start and don’t finish,” he said. “The numbers we’re reporting here are actual numbers of people who have crossed the finish line.”

Harshbarger, who lives in Wichita, said that although numbers dipped slightly in 2014, that should not cause concern for the future of the road race.

“If you look at the history, certainly the last 10 years even … the amount of growth that the sport has encountered, and certainly the rate of growth, is not sustainable in the long term,” he said. “The number of events is still growing, and … whether you’re in Wichita, Kansas City, Chicago, any given weekend based on your market there’s more options now for people to choose from.”

In recent years, race demographics have shifted, too. Whereas road races were dominated by men in the ’80s and ’90s, the majority of participants in recent years have been female. In 2014, 57 percent of all race finishers were women, according to the Running USA report.

“Everybody wants the 30-year-old professional female,” Ensz said. “That’s the gold target – these 25- to 40-year-old professional females. Now that’s not to say there aren’t people in the other areas but that’s the real driving force now.”

Harshbarger said this demographic is “very desirable” for corporate sponsors and vendors, primarily because they’re buying more shoes, apparel, water bottles and other accessories.

“It’s doing things with my girlfriends, my sister, my mom, my children,” he said of female runners. “These are the people who also make the majority of purchase decisions for their household.

“As events grow their sponsorship and underwriting for the event, they’re right to set their marketing and to appeal to this demographic.”

Events such as the Color Run and the Glow Run do attract serious runners, but Fitzgerald, whose KC Running Company organizes the Glow Run, said most of his runners are just looking for a good time.

“I would say 98 percent of those people, you would never see at a charity race,” he said. “It’s just a different group of people that do these events.”

These third-phase races have brought more variety to the sport than ever before, but “the only negative I see is that … it does affect some of the local 5Ks to some extent,” Ensz said.

“… I’d say it’s made it a little more difficult for the charity 5K to really prosper. Some are still doing it really well, but the challenge is certainly out there for those events.”

Fitzgerald said he knows people like to blame declining attendance figures at charity races on larger, for-profit races like his Glow Run, but he said that criticism is misguided. He said his company works with “literally 80 charities, probably,” in helping organize their own runs and making them more profitable.

“Would do they do business with me if they thought that was the case?” he said. “Quite honestly, they would think that I’m driving them out of business, and that’s not the case. I’m trying to make them more profitable and make them more money.

“It is hard to understand – people just don’t want to see running as a business. They want to see it as all charity, but that can’t happen.”

Organizers react, adapt

Jennifer White, executive director of ICT S.O.S., knows that there will usually be four or five other runs the same day as her Race for Freedom every fall, so she has found ways to adapt and thrive.

The run, which will be held for the fourth time this September, had 1,080 participants last year.

Most importantly, she said, she tries to keep registration costs low.

“People have a lot of runs to choose from, and we wanted to be on the lower end of the price point,” she said. “We have probably 50-50 walkers and runners, a lot that participate more for the cause than the race aspect, and I didn’t want cost to be prohibitive.”

Regular registration is $25, with $20 early-bird registration and $35 registration the day of the race.

Ensz listed the Race for Freedom as a prime example of a new local run that’s “done a great job getting that together.”

White said ICT S.O.S. promotes the run largely through volunteers, via social media and at other runs in the community. The run pays Go Race Management and Timing, Ensz’s former company, to help plan the course map and do timing on race day.

Last year, the run raised $27,500 for Youthville.

“We, for whatever reason, came out of the gate with really great numbers the first year, and we’ve stayed at that, but we’re kind of an anomaly,” White said. “I think a lot of people don’t realize – and honestly we didn’t realize – how much goes into putting something on like that.”

A local event that’s just as old, the Ballet Wichita 5K Art Run, was canceled this summer because of “bad timing,” said Sandy Wolter, Ballet Wichita’s executive director.

A former executive director who was key to the event’s planning left, the event was “not getting enough corporate sponsorship and corporate underwriting,” and larger races essentially ran it out of town, Wolter said.

“There were a lot of great things about it – the profit margin was just very small,” she said.

“Probably the biggest thing was that the number of runs grew exponentially over the past couple of years. There was so much more competition, and at the same time you have the corporate-facilitated Color Runs coming in and competing with locally sponsored, locally run things like we were doing.”

The Ballet Wichita run featured a participatory art project at the finish line, and various local artists volunteered to entertain runners along the course of its path.

“It’s a lot of volunteer hours to put together,” Wolter said. “It’s pretty expensive. You have a lot of city regulations you have to follow, and just fixed costs you can’t get around – cost of T-shirts, cost of food, all those things.”

Wolter said there is still interest in the Ballet Wichita run, judging by how many people have asked her what happened to it.

“The board is still really behind the idea … if we can line up the corporate sponsorships early enough and feel like there’s enough room to cover the costs,” she said. “Our hope is to do it every other year and get the community support we need to make it feasible and get artists involved.”

White, organizer of the Race for Freedom, said that if an event is organized well, dedicated runners will return.

“Really, I think it boils down to the events that are well organized and that go smoothly,” she said. “Your runners are going to come back year after year.

“It’s like anything – there’s going to be fads, there’s going to be trends that come and go. It boils down to the experience that people walk away from.”

Fitzgerald said most of the more gimmicky runs have started to go out of business this year. He drew a comparison to the Slide the City event that Wichita recently hosted on the Fourth of July, saying “you might do it once because it looks cool, but you’re not going to go back because there’s no hill.”

“There’s always going to be the next thing – the pet rocks or the Rubik’s Cube – but they won’t last,” he said. “There’s always going to be the 5Ks, always going to be the 10Ks, always going to be the marathon and half marathon.

“They might go up and they might go down, but at the end of the day they’ll always survive.”

This story was originally published July 18, 2015 at 3:30 PM with the headline "Crowded road-race market puts the squeeze on nonprofits."