Nationals Cross Country in Charlottesville Sold Out

Charlottesville weather forecast for Sat @ 11am looks sweet: low-mid 50s at 11am, zero precip.

If I lived close enough to go watch I would 100% sneak in there.

I have ticket, but friend doesn’t! Do you still have extra ticket?

I still have it. They were $20 a pop. Let me know how you wanna exchange info.

They also sold out PreNats. I watched the race on espn. There were not a lot of people there. I would guess less than a thousand with many of those team members.

Same was true at USA cross country in Richmond earlier this year. I was surprised how few spectators, maybe a thousand. But Rojo was there in the Lets Run mobile.

It would be nice to understand what the issue is. Saying bussing is the bottleneck makes no sense because I have been to national meets in the past where they had 4 busses running constantly.

4 buses carrying ~40 people each, that's 160 people per 25-30minute roundtrip. not many!

For those unfamiliar with UVA's course, it is located on essentially farm land. To get there, there is a small road that is pretty tight that the buses and vans have to navigate through. This is hard as well because there are many homes alongside this road, so these people need the ability to leave their homes, park their cars, etc.. So this makes parking on the road and walking in extremely difficult.

Now this is just the first difficulty. To reach the course, there is this tiny bridge (that thankfully has been reinforced over the years) to get transportation over a river. This is a one vehicle only type of bridge. Being on a bus that goes over it is already scary enough ha.

Once you get over the bridge, there is a lot of parking because it's grass everywhere. But as you can see, the bottleneck of logistics to get physical bodies there is quite hard. They had to balance getting the actual competitors there in a timely manner, while also accommodating the spectators from across the country.

And, don't even get me started on the warmup area for athletes. A very slim, short, and small flat road is located at the course. If you start adding in more cars and people, warmups are just a nightmare especially with the amount of teams there. You can run on the grass hills and avoid this issue, but who would want to do that before their most important race.

Don't get me wrong. It is a great course and awesome for spectators. The final downhill-uphill finish combination will make for an exhilarating end. But damn, this is a near impossible venue to plan such an important event for the sport.

My thoughts: build a bigger bridge ha.

Have you attended national meets? They managed to bus thousands of people to the courses. Start 2.5 hours ahead and have busses run constantly. How about more busses spaced 3 minutes apart? 50 people every 3 minutes is 1000 per hour and 2500 over 2.5 hours. The other venues did it.

hey man, you're the one who said 4 busses. i was just using your example.

People don't plan to fail. Many simply fail to plan. When are some of you dummies going to learn?

Good on UVA for selling out this event! Vin knows how to market and TrackTown USA was a much better organization when he ran it.

Most attendees have a friend or relative running. Many of the qualifiers were surprises.

5,000 was the rumored ticket capacity number that I heard.

looking forward to the reports of people parking on roads nearby and walking up, possibly trespassing through woods to bypass whatever entry gate there is. Do they have a fence around the entire property?

I'd also appreciate hearing from the people who kayak and gain access from the nearby waterway.

Yep. That's what I'd do. I'll be disappointed if people aren't doing that.

Southlake High School has some of the richest students in Texas. Every year they have about 4 student buses that drive to the neighborhood on the backside of the Texas Championship course in Round Rock. All getting in for free.

What say we paraglide in?