A lot goes into preparing for marathon

Winter’s cold is just outside of the Marine Corps Marathon office, too cold but for the hardiest of runners. Just as the sapping humidity of summer isn’t the time for marathons, neither is this.
The next full marathon is nine months away. Even the first hour of registration is two months out.
Yet there’s plenty to be done. Inside, the offices are grouped by categories like marketing, business and operations. Each is working on a different aspect of putting on the Marine Corps Marathon — the fourth biggest marathon in the country and seventh-biggest in the world — or one of the several smaller events that the office oversees.
Some are working on this year’s event, others are thinking as far ahead as 2013. Even in what would seem to be a slow time, there is much to do.
Rick Nealis is the race director, overseeing a $6.5 million budget. He’s looking out several years and trying to determine what the Marine Corps will want to accomplish by hosting the marathon and how the event will grow. He’ll have a hand in operations, looking at the business plan for the coming year.
But for the near-term, the focus is on business.
“Over the next couple of months, we might do a business plan that gets sent up to the commanding general, basically laying out those new ideas and those setups that will go into 2009-2010,” Nealis said.
One overriding concern is coordinating the event with all the police jurisdictions.
“When you run the Chicago Marathon ... Mayor [Richard M.] Daley basically says to his police chief, ‘Make Chicago safe.’ There’s one police officer with the Chicago police,” he said.
But that’s not the case for the Marine Corps Marathon, which must work with aspects of many different agencies: Arlington County, Park Police, Capitol Police, Metropolitan Police, Virginia State Police, the FBI and Coast Guard, among others. All have a different piece of turf the marathon and its course uses.
Marc Goldman has a similar task, but in a different area. As the sponsorship/marketing manager, he’s coordinating between sometimes-disparate companies to make sure the marathon gets what it needs and the companies get the exposure they seek.
Of the 33 sponsors listed in the 2008 program, three were municipalities or regional coalitions; six were food or drink brands. Across the spectrum of all the events, the total number of sponsors doubles.
“It’s a matter of learning what a sponsor’s marketing objective is and how the marathon can support that in introducing them to audiences through our event, whether it’s the D.C. market, the runners and the health-oriented crowd or it’s the military side of our event,” Goldman said.
Angela Huff, the newly-minted business manager, has her eye on a rapidly-approaching date: April 1, when registration for the race begins. After switching from paper entries to online entries, Huff is confident that the Internet hosting company will have the capacity to handle the thousands of runners that sign up in the first hours.
“This one, we actually have to move to a different server farm,” Huff said. “I have to start testing [this week]. It takes about two months to get this ready, so on April 1 we can push the button and say go.”
At the moment, Huff is working on merchandising, but came across a snafu recently when she found out T-shirts can’t be shipped overseas. She’s working on a solution to that.
She’s the de facto human resources manager. Her previous job prepared her well for the business side, but she said she’s still getting used to dealing with staffing issues.
All of that effort and all of those projects go into one very large event. When the new office first opened in 2005, there were 10 people on the staff; now, there’s more than 30. And it all serves as a massive public relations campaign for the Corps.
“Our nation’s at war. The Marine Corps is very committed to the war effort and that is kind of the focus,” Nealis said. “There’s good press and bad press that comes out of the Marine Corps and our whole military involved in that conflict. But probably almost 100 percent, I can almost guarantee, the good news from running events is all positive. And that’s one of things I promote that we need to be able to capitalize on.”