I was running beside some young boys this morning - I just went through the mud and puddles and the tiptoed around. I was telling them just to go through - they were going to get wet feet regardless.
Whilst it's obviously the RD's decision and there may be facts that aren't clear (the RD in the end is the one responsible), there are *some* very soft cancellations sometimes. These seems one of them. Some RDs are *extremely* risk adverse.
I once did one where there was a <1m long x <0.5m wide patch of ice, right at the edge of the path. The RD coned it off ~1m+ away from the ice and put 3 marshals to force people to stay ridiculously wide. The path was about 3-4m in total (about half the frozen puddle was on the path).
If it were me, I'd have just warned people very clearly there were a few small patches of ice at the eges of the path and to take care. That was all that was required to warn people of the risk. It didn't need the over the top reaction.
However, I was grateful because I know some other RDs would have cancelled because of a small patch of ice.
Similarly, one of the ones near me has done a completely new route because someone fell over and banged their knee on a small section of path (~ 15metres done 3 times) which not tarmaced and made of that silly hexagonal plastic stuff. The course is was short before. It's now about 150m short.
Some people (in general) see risk assessments as set in stone and anything that increases the risk is a cause to say no. That's not how they're supposed to work - they're about minimising risk - not eliminating it completely - and they should be somewhat flexible and allow for differing conditions.
Akie. If it were me and I were cancelling because of something that sounds innocuous, I'd probably post a photo too. I'd want to show people why (and because if I said I'm cancelling a race because of a puddle...)
The problem here is that photo suggests that the decision is a extremely risk adverse. Dare I say to the point of being a little silly.
There may, of course, be more information not in the photo that justifies the decision.
But my read from the information we have is that the puddle doesnt look excessively deep and although I don't know the surface of the path underneath, even if the left hand side is not useable (and personally I think it is, because the puddle really doesn't look deep), I think there's enough room on the other side of the path that with mitigation (probably requires a marshal to keep people to one side) it would be safe to run an event. 800m from the start is quite a long way to spread people out.
I take the point about shared path use and people coming the other way, but a marshal would solve that too.
And in terms of personpower (you might rightly say this requires an extra person you weren't expecting), you shift one of your token scanners to marshal the underpass as it's close to the start before coming back to the finish. If the event is multilap, things will have spread out sufficiently by the end of lap 1 and the marshal can then return to the finish to scan.
I'll finish there, but what is true (and widely recognised by experts) more widely in society is that our perception of risk and how risk changes in different circumstances is genuinely abysmal in general.
You only have to see the variation in how people drive to understand that.
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parkrun Café
Feb 2025