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How could someone with zero experience organising events go from one in the first year to 15 within four years? And collect NINE Racecheck awards in a single year? Chris and Claire are truly a force of nature operating from first principles. A get-it-done mindset while respecting each other's strengths and weaknesses, driven by their love of trails and passion for sharing unique routes and beautiful landscapes with others. If you’ve been on the sidelines thinking of all the good reasons why you can’t do something, then this article is for you.

Alexander Tanti: Thanks for joining me today! Let’s talk a bit about the background of how BigFeat events came about and what is your big why?

Chris: I think when the COVID pandemic hit the UK, we were still allowed to go outside and do our exercise, so Claire and I started going out on bike rides and doing some runs. We’re very lucky to live on the south coast of England. We live very close to the New Forest National Park, which is an enormous area of parkland. So, we were running in there, thinking, “Wow, some of these routes are so nice here. I wonder if there’s an opportunity to show other people some of these routes we’re finding.” That’s kind of how the seeds were planted. We started going over Ordnance Survey maps and started looking into mapping out bits and pieces. As soon as we had a route, we began to look into how to get permission to do certain things and started contacting the right authorities. Obviously, we were still in lockdown, so we couldn’t do anything immediately. So we basically just created a bunch of maps and routes to begin with.

Claire: I think I really just love looking at maps and making up routes. We avoid out-and-backs, we avoid multiple loops, and we try to make them a bit more technical and difficult. So, we’re always turning off the trail and going a different way, and if we don’t know where a path goes, reccing can take forever. We always go up at first, just in case it might be nicer. And then we end up just constantly tweaking the routes. They’re very unique, I think.

Chris: People have said that what we do is trail runs by trail runners. We’ve heard that statement quite a lot of times, you know, so we just pick the routes that we would like to run and showcase parts of places that people have never been to before, and that’s kind of how the idea was born. We both belong to a running club, so we were used to running with other people. And then it was just kind of a waiting game through COVID until we could get around to doing our first event.

Claire: We managed to get our first-ever event on the trails around Winchester, and because it didn’t go through Forestry England or any national trust, we did manage to get one on by setting them off in groups of six and with COVID restrictions in place. I think that was a really good thing in the end because there wasn’t much going on at that point. And because we both had full-time jobs, there was no risk. That’s the only way we managed to do this because if we failed at an event, then it actually didn’t matter.

Alex Tanti: So, obviously from the sounds of it, you both have great skills or unique skills, whether that’s mapping, scouting, creating unique routes, etc. But I’m interested in finding out what it is about that area or those routes that had such a big emotional impact on you that you felt so strongly about sharing it with others. Because obviously, you love running these routes; you might as well just continue running them. What was it that made you want to share them? Was there any particular experience or benefit that you got out of this that you felt you wanted to share with the world?

We wanted other people to feel exactly what we were feeling, whether it’s running a certain trail or seeing a certain view for the first time.

Chris: I think the initial one that we first recorded and put together, there was a mention that I’d spent a lot of time over there in the scouts, and there was one area that I’d always remembered that when the sun rises first thing in the morning, it rises over a lot from the horizon, and you can see right over the National Park. For us, when we do the event now, we start early so people can see this sunrise as they line up to start. I don’t know; it’s quite an emotional sort of time, I suppose. It’s like you’ve got dawn breaking and you’re just about to set off on an adventure, and that has always been an appeal for me, especially. It’s the appeal of getting up early, liking to see the sunrise. It’s a bit corny, but it’s like a new day with new possibilities, isn’t it? To see that sunrise, it doesn’t matter what happened the day before; you’ve got a clean slate if you know what I mean. So that first event we ever conceptualized is based on that experience. It’s a nice feeling now to do that event and see everyone lining up along this bank, watching the sunrise before they start the race. They’ve all got their cameras out; they’re taking photographs. And we stand there, thinking, “That’s exactly what we wanted.” You know, everyone hopefully is feeling a bit of what we felt when we first saw that ourselves. So, being able to share that, that’s it. That’s exactly what we wanted when we started BigFeat. We wanted other people to feel exactly what we were feeling, whether it’s running a certain trail or seeing a certain view for the first time. It’s special. You can’t keep these things to yourself; it’s no fun being thrilled in solitude. Everyone should be able to experience that. That’s what makes it worthwhile.

Alex Tanti: Feel free to be as corny as you like. You know, organizers of these kinds of events are some of the most passionate people I’ve ever met. You guys probably don’t do these events to become millionaires; there’s a big why behind it. And that’s what I’m trying to uncover. And Claire, would you say that it’s a similar motivation from your side as well?

Claire: Yeah, I just think, you know, so many people live in towns and cities. I’ll be driving to work, and there are people running up pavements along the main road. I really want to convert as many of those people to trails as possible because I think once people try trails, they realize the mental health benefits are huge. Many people just don’t have the confidence to go on them, and quite often, trails aren’t far from where you live. By organizing events, we hope some of these people will feel the security of being with others and realize, “Actually, this is how I got that feel-good feeling. This is something I want to do more of.” The mental health benefits of trail running are absolutely huge, and we both get so much from it. We want other people to experience that too. Making our events accessible is really important. We do quite a few things to ensure even beginners can join and enjoy our events. That’s a big plus for us.

Chris: From a personal point of view, I suffered quite a bit with addictions during my 20s and 30s. When I reached 40, six years ago, I managed to leave all that behind and have been good and sober since then. A lot of what helped me during that time was trail running. I started running, started trail running, and then I met Claire, and we ran a lot together, which helped me. Two years into that new journey, having the idea to create events and being able to share some of what I found helped me, as Claire touched on, with mental health, from depression myself, it really helps me. So, if we can give other people an opportunity, without being too overt about it — we don’t really mention too much about our personal struggles — but we let people find their own way into things that are going to help them, you know? And of course, getting feedback at the end of events about how people have maybe had similar struggles or whatever, I tend to keep stuff pretty close to my chest, but it’s quite affirming to hear those stories.

Alex Tanti: Thanks for sharing that. What’s particularly astonishing, and impressive, is managing to go from 1 event in 2020 to 11 in just three years.

Chris: Yes, and there are still places to go, but we really haven’t got the capacity for much more. We’d like to put on a 50-miler and give people a bit of a longer event, but we haven’t got the capacity for much more. I think we’ve got two more events in us. But then the problem is, how can we make it a business? Now that I understand what costs go into organizing an event, I see what good value for money is, and I struggle with some events that look lovely, but then you see the price… So we really want to keep it at a reasonable price point for people, but we also would like to have a marketing budget.

Alex Tanti: Have you found any good tactics to keep the costs down as much as possible, while not really compromising any of the experience?

I’ve got a “WordPress for Dummies” book next to my computer, which is hilarious because I use it to help do stuff on the website. We have no advertising or marketing background, no digital background, so we’re learning how to use social media

Chris: Yeah, we do absolutely everything ourselves. I think just backtracking a little bit, we’ve built up a very close-knit community around our events. We’ve had a lot of return runners, which speaks volumes. The feedback that we get in places like Racecheck, is brilliant because we can actually see it and think, “Right, we’re going to take this feedback and implement it in our next event.” But with us being quite an accessible company, and Claire and I are always around, we’re not fronted by brands, you know, we’re not a faceless entity. So, half of our success, especially on platforms like Racecheck, is because people believe in us as individuals and as a company. They keep coming back, but it’s gotten to the stage where we’re almost victims of our own success. We do everything ourselves, literally. I’ve got a “WordPress for Dummies” book next to my computer, which is hilarious because I use it to help do stuff on the website. We have no advertising or marketing background, no digital background, so we’re learning how to use social media…

Alex Tanti: It’s very impressive because a lot of times, people just hide behind the assumption that these things are difficult, and “I can’t do that unless I have a marketing team or unless I have a website developer or an agency doing all these things for me.” Examples like yours are such a big motivational and inspirational boost and an incentive for others to actually look at what’s possible and really push themselves to go that step further. Cutting costs, yes, cost these days is a big prohibitive factor, but it’s the impression of some special skill or knowledge required to at least start that I really want to try and dispel by using examples like yours to try and get people motivated to at least get started.

Chris: If we can do it, anyone can. If you have an idea, you have to believe in yourself that you can see it through or at least take the first step.

Claire: Yeah, believe in what you’re doing, and the most important thing is that you’ve got a great group, and that’s the first thing. And if you’ve got a great group, even if you only get 50 people in year one, next year, you’ll have 100. Then you’ll have 300. And I think, you know, as long as people feel that they’re supported, and you’ve got marshals out there, you are safe, you know, you will get there, but it’ll take a bit longer. So I think if we’d gone and thrown thousands at marketing, okay, our numbers would have gone off a bit quicker, but at the end of the day, word of mouth is more powerful.

Chris: That first event we organized in the New Forest National Park had 35 people in it the first year we signed up. But now we’re averaging probably 400 people per event. A second-year event that we did in January this year had 500 people. So, to be honest with you, it’s so lovely meeting new people. It’s nice seeing all the return people. You know, we’re friends with those guys now, and we’re making personal Facebook friends with a lot of them. It’s great to see new people every time.

Alex Tanti: Did anything special happen after that event that gave you the motivation and the drive to grow so quickly?

Claire: We just loved it. Like, there were loads of mistakes, like the day before. When I was signing out, I thought I could sign out 50k in a day, and we were both out till 4 am, to be back on site at 5 am. And we were still signing at 4 am, so we literally probably slept for an hour, if that. But we still loved it. We were running around in the middle of the night. And then we had the idea for the Classic Element Trail Series, which was going to be our four events based on the elements — earth, wind, fire, water. So that gave us four, and then straight away, we were like, our New Forest one, being the one that’s inspired by the element air because when you’re up there, you can see the sky. So in our minds, we’ve got the Winchester event, we’ve got another four events here, that’s five. And then it literally just snowballed. We just kept coming up with new event ideas. We’ve got one that uses a ferry, which is very local to us. The runners get on a ferry to go across a stretch of water. It’s just mind-boggling, things like that, that there’s no way you can plan to have an idea to do that. And then you just think, “I wonder if…” and then it sort of happens.

Alex Tanti: It’s so cool, you know because you’ve got these fairly traditional road events that just go around a loop where things tend to be fairly fixed which by default shift the participant’s focus on performance and just getting to the end, rather than experience. It just comes to show that, you can use creativity when it comes to organizing events and I think that’s probably what makes a lot of your events stand out.

Chris: We go the extra mile, and we make life very hard for ourselves in comparison to other similar-sized event companies. They might use, as Claire touched on earlier, out-and-backs or multi-loop. So, say like two half-marathon loops to make up their marathon, whereas we feel like we work very, very hard to put on our events and to find those routes, but then people like that. They like that when they start, they’re going on a journey for X amount of miles and coming to a finishing point rather than being passed here again or now running back the other way. It’s very easy to pick an established way, like the South Downs Way or something, and go run 50 miles from this point to this point, and you don’t even have to go out and recce, really.

Claire: We’ve found that in our area, especially where we are in the UK, there’s probably another two or three quite established events companies that seem to have a lot of brand-backing behind them, and you go on social media, and you see video adverts for their events all the time, and we’re texting each other saying, “Look at this, this is brilliant,” but also with a tinge of like, “Ah, how do we make that next step?” You know, to get like a little bit of sponsorship because we still don’t want to lose the roots and the grassroots aspect of our events, but to be able to showcase what we do to as many people as we want to.

Alex Tanti: But I think you guys are definitely going about it the right way. Understanding what creates a great experience for people and then slowly, incrementally increasing the capacity, rather than going from the perspective of, “Okay. I want to quit my job tomorrow. How can I make that happen?” and then trying to figure out what it is that people like because that usually fails.

Chris: It was very low risk, really, like we didn’t borrow any money for anything. So, we hired an arch for our first few events, you know, and then we bought our own arch. We used to hire, and borrow barriers, and after every event, we just reinvested whatever we made.

Claire: We’d say to anybody who wants to put on an event. You can be like, “We need this. We need this. We need this,” but you don’t need that much. You can hire a finishing arch, you can hire a start line team, advertising flags, you know. It can be cute to put a table for some food underneath it. You see a lot of these big companies, you think, “How are we ever going to get there?”

Alex Tanti: Yeah, I think it might be a little bit because of Claire’s success as a triathlete, and you know, having that “get on with it” mentality. My question is, do you see a lot of your participants feeling sort of fed up with more established running events or road events and looking for more of a unique experience? And do you feel that this might be an overall industry trend that is going that way?

Chris: There are a lot of people who have never run a trail event before. They are probably 10k runners, half marathon runners, or road runners, and now they’ve done a whole year of trail running, and that’s it. They’ve moved away; they like being outside in nature, getting muddy, just being away from the hustle and bustle of town or cars driving past.

As long as they’ve got nice aid stations and they’re supported by marshals, they just want to be out on trails where there aren’t huge packs where you can’t get past anyone, or you have to queue for 20 minutes to get over a stile.

Claire: A lot of people don’t actually want the razzmatazz. The people that we get are just genuine, down-to-earth people. They don’t need to be in a crowd with thousands of others, with a loudspeaker and music blaring. As long as they’ve got nice aid stations and they’re supported by marshals, they just want to be out on trails where there aren’t huge packs where you can’t get past anyone, or you have to queue for 20 minutes to get over a stile. And then these people are charging 80 quid for them, and you think, “What kind of experience are they getting?” If we have a situation like that, we limit our numbers because we don’t want anyone to have a bad experience. So we’re not greedy; if we know our routes are narrow near the stiles, we adapt to make sure the runners again have a good experience.

Chris: Claire and I are also at the finish line, handing out the medals. Give them a handshake, pat on the back, listening to their story from the run. How they felt, the ups and downs they’ve been through. I think the fact that people wait, and they’ve said this to us, they can do another event, and there’s just someone there handing out medals and maybe they get ushered through the finish line area quite quickly. Another reason that they like us and keep coming back is because they know that it’s Claire and me at BigFeat Events. That’s it, there’s no one else. We have people that help us at events, but if they have a story to tell about their experience on the trails, they can come and tell it to the people who made that route, directly. They can say, “Oh, I really enjoyed the view when I got to this bit,” or wherever they were on the course, and I think they just love that. We’ve got a Facebook page for our BigFeat community, which is just shy of 4,000 people on it now, and they have little conversations on there amongst themselves. People find each other because they’ve been running with a certain person through the events. They’re connecting, making new friendships as well. It’s great to stand back and watch it, but the feedback that we generally get, especially when we look at the Racecheck reviews as well, is the term ‘low-key’ comes up a lot. We try and be as professional as the big boys, yeah, but on a low-key scale. So, people know if they’ve got a problem or if they’ve got a suggestion or something they particularly liked well, they know that they can feed it directly back to the people that are running the show, basically, rather than going through intermediaries and somehow getting back to the guy that owns the event company who may not even be at the event.

Alex Tanti: But then I guess, if you do ever want to transition from a part-time to a full-time occupation with this, at some point do you think that might jeopardize the low-key niche that you’ve built to get to that volume or capacity required to justify doing this full-time?

Claire: We did one or two big-ticket events. So, one or two events where actually we can fit more than 200 cars in the car park, and, you know, we could put loads of different distances on but still give a really good experience. There are usually restrictions on how many cars we can park, and that’s the barrier. And if we’ve got two more events we can potentially put on that have no limits, then that might just tick the financial box. But we still want to keep all the other ones, and we would be gutted if we felt we’d lost that vibe because people say it’s a really friendly vibe and it is.

Chris: We would never want to lose that low-key aspect of things. As I said, we’ve got half a dozen events that can’t really get any bigger because of whether it’s car parking or because it’s National Trust permissions or Forestry permissions. So that’s cool with us, we can have our 350 people and keep that sort of vibe. But if we can just have the other half a dozen to be the ones that enable us to take our foot off the gas maybe and make BigFeat more of a full-time thing, that would allow us a better work-life balance and to be channelling everything we can into making the events better. We’re currently hovering between two jobs or two different lives which can dilute what you can give to both. Of course, if you take your foot off the gas in one aspect of your life then you’ve got more energy to make something much better.

Alex Tanti: I wanted to ask, going from 35 participants in your first event in the first year to over 300, almost 400, what were the big learnings from that transition that allowed you still as a two-person team to go from such a small capacity to 10x that capacity?

Chris: We’ve learned a lot, and we still make mistakes, and as long as we learn from those mistakes, we don’t mind. But whether it’s 35 people or 350 people, as long as you’re doing the same things in the right way, it doesn’t really matter. Do we say things like, “Oh, so when we have 35 people, we’ll have two portaloos; if it’s 350 people, you’re ordering seven or eight.” It’s just scaling it. If you’ve got set ways of doing something in your business, so that when you actually go through those processes, it doesn’t matter how many people are involved, it’s essentially the same.

Claire: We had six aid stations for the 35 people. Because the distances were so long, we still had to use them. So nothing was different. We didn’t take change the aid stations, we still put up the arches, and have big gazebos like we usually do. We did nothing different. So, it was the same quality as if we’d had hundreds of people.

Starting the right way is key. We don’t cut corners because there are only a few people. So, when things have scaled up, it’s been quite a natural process, and we haven’t really been overwhelmed by the fact that there are 500 people or 600 people.

Chris: Starting the right way is key. We don’t cut corners because there are only a few people. So, when things have scaled up, it’s been quite a natural process, and we haven’t really been overwhelmed by the fact that there are 500 people or 600 people. You may need more porta-loos or more admin, emails, and questions, and getting things ready for the chip timing, but that’s mostly paperwork. Claire’s very well organized, and I’m ridiculously thorough about how I like things to be done. So somehow, we haven’t killed each other yet.

Alex Tanti: Perhaps you can speak a little bit to what you think are the key ingredients for making it work when you work so closely together as a couple.

Claire: As a teacher, I’m in charge of Excel spreadsheets. And also one day i’ll just dedicate to admin. So, I sit at my desk all day, and do all of the permissions, and spreadsheets, and answer all the emails. I do that side of things whereas Chris is the creative one. So, he designs the medals, he does marketing adverts, and then he also has the vision of how the event is set up on the day. So, I totally leave him to that, but I do all the marshal planning, so I know where every single marshal is, and at what time they’re there, and if anything goes wrong on the course, I straightaway know what can be done about that. And whereas Chris will be at the finish, and he’ll be there making sure that everything is set up correctly

Chris: First, you’re both trying to do absolutely everything. And then you realize that doesn’t work. You know, you can’t both be trying to do everything because then you end up not doing anything properly. So, getting our roles defined, especially because we’ve got a team of maybe four to six people that will come and do every event with us as paid volunteers, they know our ways and our protocols and how we go about things. That’s freed us up a bit more time. It’s crucial to split these roles up sometimes; we can’t both be race directors, you know. So, it’s better for Claire to do the race director role. She does the safety briefings. She has a very, very good knowledge of where everyone is on the course regarding marshals, volunteers or aid stations. That allows me to step away and sort out issues, which happens quite a lot.

Claire: Chris is always there at the finish line, making sure that when they finish, there’s that face. He’s very good at remembering names. So, “Oh, hello John. You did our event last year,” is perfect for him. And now we’re kind of dipping out of helping him on the finish line but also stepping back and just sorting out anything that’s happening elsewhere.

Chris: As we naturally grow and get bigger, it’s like we’re too big for just the two of us but too small to take on any full-time employees. In my head, especially, I look at it in terms of where we will be in 2025, 2026? I’d want a course manager, someone who’s responsible for just sorting out all the signage the day before, responsible for anything that’s going out on the course. We already utilize one of our paid volunteers as an aid station manager. He’s got a van; he’ll be driving around checking that the stations are delivered properly, they’re set up right if they need anything he can get to them to give more water or whatever. So slowly but surely, we’re taking other parts of the job that would always be up to Claire and me and being able to delegate them to someone else. That’s one of the biggest changes, really, from the beginning, is that at the start, we couldn’t pay anybody else anything. So, they were all these people who would come on the day, volunteer, get a free place in an event, or friends and family just doing favours for us. Having different sets of people for every single event who had never done anything before and managing all that was really difficult. In contrast, now we pay probably at least four people. And we’ve got a team of about six people, and between four and six of them will work every event. They all know what they’re doing and even if you put them on a horrible job you can say, “Oh, it’s that horrible road crossing, but you’ve got six hours. Can you do just three hours here?” It’s made life so much easier having the team take care of small tasks. The step up from that would be somebody totally taking over an area, like in charge of marshal plans. It’s quite hard letting go, because I know how much work has taken to know all this stuff. Even signing the course, I mean, I see organizers casually saying, “Oh, can anyone help sign the course?” It’s difficult; we don’t let anyone sign; there’s a way we want it done, and because the course is complex, there are certain things about signing to ensure that people won’t go the wrong way. How many places do you sign, how many confidence markers, and how tight the arrows are. Anyone doing it we’d almost have to have them do signing training.

Alex Tanti: And when it comes to volunteers, whether paid or unpaid, you still rely on people with the reputation of your events. How do you go about choosing the right people?

Claire: It’s a lot easier now because they’re all from our community. Whereas before, I was getting my son’s friends. I was like, “Look, I’ll give you 20 quid if you come and stand on this drop-off thing,” We offer a free event place now to some volunteers. We find a lot of people within the community, and it could be something as simple as the event that we’re running this Sunday, for example. There’s a 16-mile option on the courses, so they may come along and help out in the car park in the morning, then they get their free place to go and run the event, or they might do the 16-mile and then at the end, after they finish, they might put on a high-vis and help me give out medals or, you know, just be a general another person who can help out at the finish line. And they want to be involved. We’ve got a girl who’s emailed us saying, “I’m really not feeling too good, so probably don’t want to run the event, but can I come along anyway, just to help out?” They love the vibe and the community feel of being part of it, so I’m not going to lie, finding volunteers is still probably our number one challenge.

Chris: It’s the most time-consuming thing. But now, if we’re short and we put a call out on our community page, saying, “We’re short, can anyone help?” we always get yeses. And so, we’re always on the day thinking we could do with two or three more, but…

Claire: The great thing about having volunteers from our running community, is they know the kinds of things they’d want the marshals to say to them as they were coming up to a road crossing or something. So, we trust them and their knowledge. It’d be different if it’s someone who’s never run any type of event before to volunteer as a marshal because they have yet to get the experience of an event.

Alex Tanti: And you literally would email the entire community with a request?

Claire: No, we don’t do that. We just put it on our Facebook community page. The only one we really need help with now is we’ve got two events in Manchester. A big Christmas event and we have one in Lyme Park. For that one you don’t need as many marshals as we can normally manage that with friends and family. But the Christmas one, we’ve been very close to having to go to a company and pay people to do it because we just haven’t got the community base there yet.

Chris: It’s difficult because I’ve seen events before where they’ve quite clearly paid a random company, and people just sit there on their phones; we wouldn’t want that. Their hearts are not into it. They’re just there, and I think that’s not the point of having a marshal. They need to understand what the runners are going through.

Alex Tanti: Yeah, even as a participant, it really sucks when you see people obviously not caring.

Claire: Yeah, and as a new event organizer, doing the marshal plan is the hardest bit because you have to work out the fastest runner, slowest runner, every single marshal point, timings etc. There’s so much information that we use at each marshal point so they’re at the right place at the right time, and then we always have to do a separate one for parking. But once you’ve done that for year one, year two, you’re just then filling in the names. You’ve got the timings, you’ve got the slots, you’ve got everything else sorted.

Chris: It gets easier. We were saying earlier on that if you do everything right initially, then when you scale it up year on year, it’s not too massive of a job because you’ve done things properly the first time around. It’s short-term pain for long-term gain. It might take a little bit of time to do it initially.

Claire: The numbers are pretty much set whether you’ve got 10 people or 1000. It is a lot easier when there are more people because the marshalls are busier.

Alex Tanti: So, you’ve got a dedicated Facebook group for your community, which is, I guess, separate from your event Facebook pages. Would you offer a free entry to anybody willing to volunteer, or anything else as well on top of that? Have you found any tips and tricks that tend to work really well?

Chris: Generally, the free event entry works nicely. The fact that we offer quite a few events now, up to almost 15 for this year, that’s quite a lot of money if people want to enter all of those events. So, we say to people, volunteer at a couple of events, then that will pay for another two events if you want to do them.

Claire: I think the other thing I try to do is to make their marshalling experience as positive as possible. So, if we have a coffee van, there’s always a marshal tab. If we have pizza, there’s a marshal tab so they can get food, they can get a hot drink. And then also, you don’t stick someone on a road crossing for five hours. Personally, I’d instead do an hour and a half into the race, you know, then have a chance to perhaps go to the toilet in between, grab a coffee, and then actually be somewhere all on my own for a long period of time. And once you’ve got your returning volunteers, you know they can handle that, and they don’t mind doing that. But when someone volunteers for the first time, I always put them on something quite nice. So, there’ll be an aid station, or they’ll only be doing two-hour stints. So, first-time volunteer, especially if I don’t know that person, I give them preferential roles. They go, “Oh, that was okay. That was fine.” You know, but once you’ve built that relationship with them, they’re happy to go the extra mile..

Alex Tanti: You can then get them to dig for 12 hours!

Chris: We’ve really made them feel part of the event team as well. I call them the legends of BigFeat because BigFeat was our play on the Big Foot. We can’t do it without them. We always say, “Be part of the event team.” They’re not just volunteering for us, you know, they love to come and experience everything. People love seeing it from the other side, Alex, to be honest with you. I heard a quote earlier on in the last year that said, ‘Bring more to the table than you take from it,’ and I think that’s true in everything. But when I think about our event company, it’s good to remind people that yes, you can come and do every single event and blah, blah, blah. But these events can’t be put on without people giving up their time. Everyone wants to run Parkrun, for example, but you have got to be able to give up your time as well; otherwise, parkrun wouldn’t exist. I try to remind people, not that they’ve got an obligation to but, you know, they can…it’s always good to give a lot more as well from helping on the other side and seeing how the mechanics of running the event work from behind. So, it gives them another perspective.

Alex Tanti: It’s common to see people regret registering as volunteers, but they never regret actually having volunteered after the event.

Claire: That is exactly right. Once they do it, they go, “Oh, really loved that.” Some people do worry a bit and lack confidence such as ‘Oh, do I get any training? What do I do? How do I cross them over that road?’ “

Chris: We’ll see that because we sometimes get a lot of emails from one or two people in particular asking a lot of questions. You baby-step them into it and help them because we want everyone to go out there and be confident, enjoy themselves, and have a good time. You know, we don’t want anyone standing in a marshal position going, “What if I get it wrong?”

Alex Tanti: One last question. Increasing the number of events naturally increases the amount of risk you’re taking on board in terms of one of those events having to be cancelled for weather or whatever reason. How do you handle that? What have you found is a way that people find acceptable, or how do you manage expectations around that?

Chris: We’ve been quite fortunate, really. We had to cancel our big Christmas event at the last minute, and it was tough. It was the right decision, though. We constantly monitored the weather and discussed it, and ultimately, safety comes first. It wouldn’t have been safe to hold the event with the conditions we were facing, so we made the call to cancel it.

Claire: It was really about communication for us. A week before the event, we started putting out emails to everyone involved, saying, “Look, it’s looking a bit iffy with the weather. We’re keeping an eye on it.” We just kept everyone updated every step of the way. And when we finally had to cancel, we explained why, detailing the safety concerns and the conditions. Most people were understanding; they appreciated being kept in the loop.

Chris: That’s it, really. The community we’ve built trusts us to make the right decisions. We don’t make these decisions lightly. When we’ve had to make tough calls, like canceling an event, people know it’s because we genuinely care about their safety and their experience. That trust goes a long way.

Claire: And the options we offered were important too. We gave people the choice to defer their entry to the next year, transfer to another event, or take a partial refund. We tried to be as fair as possible, given the circumstances. It’s never easy, but being transparent and offering options helped a lot.

Alex Tanti: That’s very professional. And at the end of the day, it’s about using common sense, isn’t it? It’s what’s best for everyone involved.

Chris: Exactly. We aim to run our events as professionally as possible while still being accessible and maintaining that community feel. It’s about striking that balance, and thankfully, our participants see that. They appreciate the effort we put in to ensure everyone has a great experience, whether the event goes ahead as planned or we face unexpected challenges.

Alex Tanti: It’s a testament to the amazing work that you guys are doing, and I must say, you’re role models and incredible examples of what can be done with passion and tenacity. So, unfortunately, we’re out of time, but this has been incredibly insightful, and with some amazing takeaways for both beginner and veteran organisers alike. Thank you for your time!