Posted on the Ultralist:
Date: Mon, 21 Dec 2015 17:23:46 +0000 From: lazarus <[email protected]> Subject: thinking of an alaska vacation? greeting listers; my trip to the dome last year spurred a lot of ideas. and i have been discussing those ideas with joe, off and on, ever since. we have made some preliminary inquiries, and i think we could actually do what we have been discussing. i think this is a good time to put out a feeler, to gauge potential interest. we are looking at august of 2017 as a potential date to stage another 6 days at the dome. with some fundamental changes in the event. again, we would want to hold ancillary events. just a 6-day would be prohibitively expensive. currently, we were thinking in terms of: a 48 hour, a 24 hour, *an elite 100 mile*, and an everyman 100mile. however, instead of running the events concurrently on the same track, we would build a curb (probably with bricks) to separate the track into an inner and outer track. there is an overhead walkway to access the interior of the track. ancillary event runners could "watch" the 6-day, and 6-day runners could observe the ancillary events. but neither would interfere with the other. i have a lot of details in mind for the running of the event(s), but i will save those for later. the crux of the whole enterprise is the availability of dorm rooms at the nearby university. what we would set up is the availability of renting those rooms for 9 nights around the race. it would not matter which event you were running. you could rent rooms for just yourself, or yourself and family (wife, and/or kids/friend/etc) and here is why: while i was in alaska, i was struck by the cost. of everything. motel rooms are outrageous, car rental requires you to be a billionaire. most people, on their alaska vacation, take tour buses for different tours. it is a thriving industry there. and the vacation costs a fortune, if you do not have family living there. it struck me that, if we could make the low cost (something around 50$ per night) rooms that were provided to the elite runners available to all entrants... along with traveling companions, a runner could have an alaska vacation for less than the cost of a regular alaska vacation.... and run an ultra while they were there. we could work with the local tour companies, and have tour buses make pickups at the dorm every morning. you could do the alaska tourist thing every day you weren't running. convenient and cheap. your family could do the tourist thing the whole time (if they are jaded with watching you run ultras) for runners whose wives/families feel shortchanged by running vacations this would be a great opportunity to earn brownie points.... and run an ultra! a lot of water will have to pass under the bridge, before we can bring such an idea to fruition. to make it work, we would have to find at least 120 runners who would want to have an alaska vacation... and run an ultra while they were there. compared to the usual cost of an alaska vacation, the ultra would be practically free. would an idea like this interest you? laz
