First, and foremost, I would like to express my extreme appreciate to Sharyn McManus Moss for accepting the enormous task of being Race Director for the 2019 Fall Back Blast. It is a demanding undertaking and having worked very closely with Sharyn on this event for the past few months, I can personally attest to the time, effort, thought and true love of trails and trail running that Sharyn poured into this. Much thanks to Sharyn’s family as well, who not only dealt with all of the time and work that Sharyn put into this, but also cheerfully (from what I saw) jumped in and helped in so many various ways with positive attitudes and lots of smiles.
So, thank you Sharyn! I hope that after the dust settles, you will want to do this again next year! 🙂
I also want to give a shout out to the previous Race Director (and creator) of the Fall Back Blast, Laura Plummer. The solid foundation that Laura has built for this race over the past 6 years was definitely a factor in the success of this year’s race and for the future of FBB.
Thank you, Laura!
And, of course, a very special thank you to all of our volunteers who came out and made this event happen. We, quite simply, cannot do these events without the many volunteers who cheerfully help wherever needed. There are many who are there for every event, year after year and I just can’t express the appreciation I have for that and how much it helps in creating and maintaining the trails for all of us to enjoy.
A lot of great things happened for this race, including a record number of racers for the Fall Back Blast, and we hope that all of the runners had a fun day on the trails! Although this race is a big fundraiser for CORBA to enable us to have the resources to create and maintain the trails, another big goal of CORBA is to get people out to enjoy them as much as possible and I believe this event was a huge success in that part of our mission.
We have also identified some things that did not go quite as planned. This is not the time and place to dwell on that, but please rest assured that we are well aware of most of these issues and are already working on ways to improve on them in order to make the Fall Back Blast (and other CORBA events) better than ever! In the next couple of days, we will be sending out a survey to all of the runners in order to get even more specific feedback to draw upon as we plan for next year (and yes, we are already talking about and planning for next year).
Lastly…big, Big, BIG, thank yous to all of the runners that participated this year! We sincerely hope that you had a great time and that we will see you out here again next year!
Please stay tuned for our announcements of the date and for special registration offers for Fall Back Blast 2020.
Happy trails,
Steve Wood
President, CORBA
Course Director and Lead Marker, FBB (send any complaints and/or suggestions to me…and yes, a “little” extra distance was intentional)
Quesadilla Maker, Skull Aid Station (sorry I was a bit behind schedule this year)