No, its not me that is out of the running. This has to do with an email that I received this morning.
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| The email sent this morning |
Final Kick Events has finally kicked the bucket. This makes me happy on so many levels. For those who do not know, Final Kick is a Boise local race directing “company.” They have put on many local races (poorly) for the last 8 years, and I am happy to see that they will not be doing anymore races locally.
I was fine with Final Kick when they first started out. Heck, I was even a “Race Ambassador” in 2014 for them to help promote their races in exchange for free race entries. They had some hiccups, running out of post race snacks comes to mind, that I thought was weird but I was OK with things that happen sometimes. But the things happen over and over again. I was a little bummed at one race where I placed 2nd in my age group. I was given a $25 Road ID gift card instead of a gift basket that included snacks and a massage from a local therapist. That was given to a 3rd place runner. That shows what Final Kick thinks about me. I was a little miffed about that and decided from there that I would not be doing any more Final Kick events. I did but that is because Team Beef wanted us to do Run4Luv as a team race. I did not do any race recaps or social media posts because I did not want to give any advertisement whatsoever of the company. I gladly kept my mouth shut with anything to do with Final Kick.
You figure with a company that is owned by people who have participated in many running races, including many ultra marathons, that they would figure out what runners want and need. Prices got raised, more races added. Its like getting pregnant and you know that you can’t afford having another mouth to feed, not able to work, eating out of the dumpster and homeless, but you have 6 more children, one right after the other. Something like that if you get my drift. Instead of aborting a child or not having sex, they have more.
I have had many conversations with other runners who have been disappointed in their management of races. There have been many local runners that think that Final Kick has been greedy, and I can not disagree. There was a time a few years ago that I wanted to put a flyer for the wine business I was doing into their goodie bags. Wayne said that it would be a couple of hundred dollars for me to place a flyer, a flyer that I purchased at my own expense, into the racer goodie bags. Yea, no, that’s not gonna happen. Heck, I would have volunteered to place the flyers in the goodie bags myself, but nope. I already decided that I was not going to give anymore money to the company.
Either, they did not want to do the race directing anymore, or they wanted the money for race entries without any legal repercussions and ran the business into the ground. How do you get $60,000 in debt when races should not cost that much to do? The timing company costs money, websites cost money, reserving the park costs money. The race medals and security costs money, but how is the bank extending $60,000 of credit to the business? But why has there been not much local support of sponsors or businesses making sure certain needs were taken care of? Final Kick just needed our money to buy a new house, get their real estate license or whateves.
The blog post in May did hint that you are taking your own chance if you don’t pay for insurance when you place your race registration order.
You can still opt for the event insurance, but most people ignore that and then were upset when we don’t offer refunds…so problem solved.
That quote was from here. You can hear the sneer in Wayne’s voice. There are things that you really should insure. Your car and health is some of them. I shouldn’t have to worry about the race I spend $35+ on to go on as expected. Maybe there is bad weather or it has to be postponed and switched to a different date. I don’t have to buy food insurance when I go and order a $35 steak at a restaurant. When it doesn’t get to my table, the waiter has to remind me that I should have bought food insurance. Kinda the same thing with this here. Wayne and Christine have been premeditating this for quite some time. He warned the runners in May.
I am sorry my fellow runners are out of their race entry fees for all of the races on the docket for the rest of the year. Struttin for Stuffin, Ho Ho hustle, Idaho Wine Run. Hopefully another brave person(s) will step up and take the place of local race director for the Boise area. I will gladly participate and share my race recap 🙂 Heck, if you need some race direction help, I would be more then willing to volunteer. Boise can never have too many races.
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