Autumn is coming ! which means Winchester is done and live !
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| All start at the Winchester 9am start of the 10k before the Half marathon. |
The full searchable and lots of photos gallery is here: https://sspimg.com/Winchester-Half-2022-Gallery
and the results are hosted here with DBMax if you need to double check your race number: https://sspimg.com/winchester-results-2022
If you want to see any of the other events from September 2022- go here: https://sspimg.com/September-2022-Gallery
More pictures down the page... read through / wade through this issues issues, or just jump to the bottom...
My apologies for the lack of recent emails and updates - firstly that's mostly due to a lack of work, caused by the sad and unfortunate passing of Her Majesty The Queen, and the subsequent cancelling of all the events we were working on. We fully supported that as a way of showing respect. God save the King !
For those interested - that's a complete cancellation of these events for us - and workers at these events - that's not a postponement, like what those football matches were. Losing what was half of our work in September wasn't on our financial plan, and it usually very busy to make up for the much quieter next four months and the seasonality this business has - ie no work.
In addition to that we have had several events decide that they were going to use volunteer photographers to cover their events. I can't argue with their cost saving logic, but I would argue that volunteer photography is not a direct replacement for a professional service. And yes - I do get told "oh it will be really good". err. riiiight. It never is.
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| Got to be in the right place, at the right time, pointing in the right direction, just to get these shots. Providing continuous coverage of a 40hr event - gallery ready next day - is not an amateur endeavour in often cold, dark and wet conditions. It involves a whole team co-ordinated effort. |
Simply in terms of the product that the participants get (volume of images, quality, gallery user experience, searchability, capturing everyone) or the time it takes to actually put the images online (live, next day or many many days ?), and of course the hosting of the searchable gallery where everyone can access it, and actually - yes - you're going to have to pay for something vaguely functional. I have yet to see a volunteer photo gallery that comes near 10% of what we do and yet I do see people getting disproportionally excited when they find one half obscured photo of themselves as proof they existed at an event. It's some kind of scarcity = high value psychology I'm sure.
Cataloguing everything is time saving for everyone. we do the hard miles. very quickly. Because we're good at it - is no reason to argue that we should be cheaper at it (*that* event organiser was following Trussonomics I think)
I often consider the simple time-saving benefit of a good searchable gallery saving everyone from having to browse through all the images - it is literally thousands of hours of participants time that gets wasted. I often wonder if it's because the event organisers don't realise the consequences, or don't really care that it wastes everyone's time, or just have never done the maths.
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| Time is a dimension in space - roughly about this wide |
I was asked about putting a browsable non-catalogued gallery for an event without race numbers and 1000 participants the other day because they thought people could just find their own images. When I pointed out that the similarly sized Winchester half and 10k had 35,000 images and that people would literally *never* find themselves without a lot of luck and perseverance - they concluded that race numbers might be a good idea.
Always a silver lining though having no work. well sort of. For you...
As a consequence of *having no work* I ended up analysing just how much the impact of Covid and the new social work from home and it's impact on playing from home on races. You will have seen my seminal analysis report in the last blog https://sspimg.com/2022-participant-survey
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| Do you love spreadsheets ? it's this sort of attention to detail that started the Big Short |
But - just how big is the drop ? So I went and looked up over 600 race results (yes I was that person up until 2am filling in a spreadsheet) - across all sorts and sizes of events that had a very good track record of taking place, from 2013 to 2022, (yes predominantly south east England) and then had a good look at them. I've not broken them down by race distance - but the general trend is very clear.
Well basically - it's around a 28% drop. You might as well say a third. And it's across all sizes of events.
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| 28% drop in event participation since Covid from 2017-2019 to 2022. |
In reality - a 1439 participant race is now a 971 person race on average. Events that previously would have been scaling up for anything up to 2000 runners and averaging 1500 - are wondering why only half that number are turning up. Apart from anything else - it's causing them to have spent twice as much on their advanced costs related to the number of runners they have to plan for. That doesn't leave much for photographers.
Here's my free consulting advice for all the race organisers out there. Unless you're particularly lucky or special ( I have not analysed that yet!) - budget your numbers to be 30% below your 2017-2019 average. Scale your budget and event infrastructure accordingly, and fill the race up to that capacity. Do not think it will be the same size as pre-covid until you have had a year back and filled.
That way you won't be spending unnecessarily on too many medals, t-shirts, toilets, water stations and other goodies like branded drinking bottles - you'll still be able to budget in costs like event photography - which should only be priced on "runners on the day" - so a very very low risk and capacity plan friendly way of being costed for an event. You only have to pay for the photos of runners there on the day too ! (because - how else?).
Just looking at the numbers - it took four years for the bigger events to get up to their pre-covid levels (thanks 2012 legacy) - and that drop has been pretty harsh. It will take at least four years to get back to where they were - assuming we don't have a total economic collapse of society as we know it in the meantime / remainder of Liz Truss's two months as Prime Minister.
Putting all that in perspective, I'm grateful to still have a few jobs and events to still work at - but we might have to cut our offering to match the new economic "normal", cover the insane new fuel bills, mortgage increases, $ exchange rate (because we buy some of our technology licensing in US Dollars so that price is up over 20% in the year), not to mention Inflation and paying a fair and living wage... if you're not going for a run to de-stress from this lot - I can only advise going gluten free instead. Or both.
In the meantime we've helped the BHF raise lots more money, and also helped runners at the winchester half marathon and hilly 10k remember a wonderful day to run around the ancient countryside. That is a non-conditional source of happiness to have been able to do that.
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| Good team finishing at the Hove Lawns |
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| You expect the problem with Seagulls in Brighton not Weybridge |
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| across the wilds of surrey |
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| over the North Downs |
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| Don't look behind you - but after the river, you're going up that hill, with Devils Dyke in the distance.. |
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| The stoneage forts of Chanctonbury and Cisbury Rings in the distance above Steyning as they made it up Truleigh Hill |
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| That finishing achievement feeling ! Raising plenty of money for the BHF ! |
Then in Winchester
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| Chris Thompson officially started the race, then popped on some race shoes, and a vest with a number on - and gave it some beans from the back. |
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| turns out they were winning beans |
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| The early morning sunlight had a nice effect at the start for the race |
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| A quick lap past the Cathedral |
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| Wally did very well and she looked strong |
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| A nice run up the slopes back into town |
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| Across to the canal path |
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| Back past the Cathedral grounds entrance |
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| flying in for the win |
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| wings wide for the winning finish |
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| If you can do this - then you can do literally anything you want to put your mind to ! |
So, I'm off for my Covid booster 4 tomorrow morning as I'm Mr.Vunerable due to my arthritis drugs, and according to the stats - we're starting to get into wave 4 already - this early in autumn. The last boosters flared my arthritis, I was not amused, and it hurt like jabbing knives in my hand joints.
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