The Business of Running: How Eric & Sharon Lindberg Create Epic Race Experiences

Sharon, Eric: DFW Running Talk
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Chris Detzel: [00:00:00] Welcome to DFW Running Talk. I'm Chris Detzel. So let's get started.

All right. Welcome to another DFW Running Talk. I'm Chris Detzel, and today we have two special guests, Eric Lindbergh and Sharon Lindbergh. How are the two of you today? I'm doing great.

Sharon: I'm doing excellent. Thank you. Thanks for coming on. I

Chris Detzel: appreciate it. You guys are all around Dallas Fort Worth.

Putting on these running events and everything else. And I thought to myself, I see you guys all the time. And I was like, it would be really cool to have a conversation to get to know the two of you. So again, thanks for coming on. And Eric, I'm going to start with you. Tell us a little bit about yourself, a little bit about your running journey, and then we'll go from there.

If that's true.

Eric: Yeah, sure. So running running journey is probably the best place to start. So I was never a runner. Yeah, I listened to a couple of your pro podcasts of the, Dallas Marathon champs and listened to them talk and fantastic discipline and just amazing athletes. I was not that [00:01:00] athlete.

In high school, I played tennis and baseball. I played in, and I was a fat kid. So my, my intro to running really started with tennis and one of the first workouts we had to do, and we had to do a lap basically around the campus of the high school, which was roughly about a foot and myself and one other guy, we always got a headstart cause we were the chunky tennis players and everybody else would catch us.

Chunky tennis players. Yeah. I

Chris Detzel: feel like tennis players, are pretty nimble and, but.

Eric: I wasn't in Boca Raton, that type of tennis player. I was in South Bend, Indiana. I think tennis season lasted two weeks. So you didn't have to be.

Chris Detzel: Yeah.

Eric: So I would start with him and everybody would catch us.

And then, we'd be the last, we'd be the first people to start and last people to finish.

Chris Detzel: They knew that, it was like, you gotta get this over with at some point. So y'all go ahead. I had some talking to do over here and then fair enough.

Eric: Yeah. We were the turtles. But what I realized later in life, not in high school, was that was a great way to lose weight.

And, I've ~ ~[00:02:00] played slow pitch softball and when we

moved to Dallas in what, 98? Yeah, 98. ~ ~And, I was just struggling to get to second base. Heck, struggling to get to first base. Same issues in high school too. Yeah. ~ ~And I said, you know what, I remember running in tennis and I could lose some pounds.

So I started to do that. And with a buddy of mine, we just went out on the Katy trail when the Katy trail wasn't, didn't even exist. Basically it was the old railroad trail. We went out and just if I could get 20 minutes, 10 minutes out, 10 minutes back running and running in the tennis shoes.

So not running shoes, tennis shoes and just started. Doing that and lost some weight, entered a 5k, dashed down Greenville one

Chris Detzel: year. Wow, that race has

Eric: been on forever. Caught the bug and, sent just from a running perspective, that, that's where I started and that was.

It was right before Sharon and I got married in, in it was probably 99 or 2000 is when we [00:03:00] started doing that. And so over time I lost, 50 pounds and ~ ~just kept going from there. And my goal nowadays, if I can run a hundred miles a month, that's great. Although Sharon gauntlet on me for New Year's she gave me a resolution of 1500 miles.

So

Sharon: he had his goal for him.

Chris Detzel: That's a lot, going from 1, 000 to 1, 500.

Eric: Yeah.

Chris Detzel: That's my hope, because I only did 1, 100 this year, this last year, and I was like, man, I got to move it up, sharon, any kind of would love to hear about your journey a little bit. But then I want to hear about how you two met.

So tell me your journey. And then if whoever wants to tell me about how you met and things like that'd be great.

Sharon: My journey is still being written. There's that. Of

Chris Detzel: course, all of ours. Absolutely.

Sharon: Yeah, but it started it started through Eric because he started running, but I've always been into fitness.

I used to Work out at the gym for three hours a day. And I was training for like a Miss Fitness contest. That is all like muscle. Three hours a

Chris Detzel: day. Yeah,

Sharon: [00:04:00] yeah. It was wild. And that's, Eric met me right at the end of that. And so I was super fit and then took a career and started working.

Kind of got a little lazy, and when we moved to Dallas, we had the trade trail right near us, and I always loved being outside, so I always, rode my bike, and walked, and did some things, but I didn't have a set thing that I did consistently, and so Eric had invited me first of all, I got, invited to the Dashdown Greenville, and I was like, oh, they drink beer, this is cool, I like this.

No wonder

Chris Detzel: all of your races has beer or some kind of alcohol. Yeah. Yeah.

Sharon: The carrot being, put out there. So that loosened me up to it. And then I discovered a running store that had awesome clothes and I loved like the fashion part of it. So I was like, Ooh, I want these shorts and this top and this jacket.

And so as I was going into the running store, buying hundreds and hundreds of dollars of clothes. Who said [00:05:00] it? Who said running

Chris Detzel: is not expensive, by the way?

Sharon: Yeah.

Chris Detzel: So you met him at a running store? Yeah. Sorry.

Sharon: That's not how we met. Yeah. So then I decided, I was like, take this up. And so one day I was like I'm going to go walk and, just do some miles and whatever.

And this girl went by me with a double baby stroller jogger. I was like, what, no, that can't happen. But that was the day I started running. Not that's a bad thing. It's not a bad thing. It was very motivating for me personally. I thought it was awesome that she could do that. Yeah. So I took off after her, chased her down and then started just, hanging out at the races and doing a little runs here and there.

And then a friend of mine threw down the gauntlet to me to do the Chicago marathon one year. And that was, I was also driven by a social run that involved beer. It went well. I see a theme here. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Detzel: That's great. So you did the Chicago Marathon. What did you think?

Sharon: Oh, it was awesome. To see [00:06:00] people, eight, nine, ten people deep cheering along, the sidewalk, the whole city gets behind it, the energy, it was just awesome.

I loved it.

Chris Detzel: So you guys didn't meet in Texas

Eric: then, you met somewhere else? Yeah, we met in California, in, in Bakersfield, California. Okay. So that is, so I was back in college started marketing all, I tell the story, it's all pre Jerry Maguire. So there, there was no such thing as sports marketing when I was in college.

And when I graduated. I had my choice of internships. I could, I was working at a played against sports store and was the manager there in Muncie, Indiana. And I could, there was a new store in Indianapolis and they needed somebody to manage it. So I could do my internship as the manager there, or I could join the staff at the Indiana Pacers and do my internship with the Pacers.

It was not a hard decision. Went to Indianapolis. It was on their summer sales team. It was great. It was the year, the years of Reggie Miller and the evil New York [00:07:00] Knicks and Spike Lee. Remember all that Jordan's come back. It was an insane time and just a whole lot of fun and just caught the bug and said, this is fun.

This, how do I, work in this space and everybody's young and again, pre Jerry Maguire, so the way to move up, you had to move out. So I bounced around and, always continuing to look for the, the next promotion, next raise. And it may sound funny, I went from being an intern at the Pacers, which you don't get paid anything, it's commission only.

Yeah, eventually what moved me out to Bakersfield, if you can believe this, was a hockey team, the Bakersfield Fog, West Coast Hockey League, minor league hockey team I'd say our biggest claim to fame was Wayne Gretzky's brother, Keith, was our coach. That's cool. Yeah, cool. But we played in this auditorium.

That didn't even have, the year before I got there, I should say, the year before I got there, didn't even have glass up, they had chicken wire so it was definitely a slap shot moment, but I was a VP, [00:08:00] I was Vice President of Sales and Marketing, and I was, 22 years old, 23, like that yeah, I'll take that job, I'll take that job.

And that's, and I moved out to Bakersfield and then we had our first media day. And we did a media day differently than a lot of teams do. We didn't introduce the players. We wanted to introduce the front office staff because we were building a new stadium and really trying to revitalize this team.

And at the time, Sharon was the account executive for the hockey team and she sold radio and I will let her take it from there.

Sharon: Yeah. Radio advertised, this was, so this was like back in the day when radio was

Chris Detzel: really

Sharon: cool.

Chris Detzel: I remember.

Sharon: Yeah, people. That's all you had.

Yeah, exactly. You might put in there.

Chris Detzel: Yeah. You sick? You like that? No, it was probably CDs then. Anyways.

Sharon: Yeah, maybe. It could have been the phase out of tapes and early CDs, yeah. So yeah we were invited to come to this media day at the offices or the arena. I can't even remember where it was.

But we were all starving artists [00:09:00] ourselves, so it was like, oh, they're going to have some free food and we're there, let's do this. So we go. And with the time I worked for a station that had. I think we had three radio stations, and so each account executive from each station got invited to go. Me and two of my cohorts went, and It was awesome.

It was like hockey because, Bakersfield, middle of California, in the valley, Central Valley, and it's 110 in the summer. And, we get, we got snow once every two decades. I don't even know. It's just what is this? So yeah, so we went and I met Eric and I think I asked him if he could give me some extra hockey pucks to take back to the front office girls, because we had, a lot of the girls in the office didn't get out to all the fun things.

So I would always bring stuff to them. And so you loaded me up with 20 hockey pucks, and so I'm walking out with two hands and a bunch of pucks and I'm like, what the heck just happened? I don't even know what happened because he was so enchanting too. He gave a really good speech and he gave me all these hockey pucks and I was [00:10:00] like, this guy's interesting.

And so the spark was lit.

Eric: Nice. And then

Chris Detzel: Eric, you just asked her out or how did that work?

Eric: She asked me out. She'll verify that. So it was a fake ask out. It's part of the, what was it called? 40, 40 club or the

Sharon: Active 2030 club. We, yeah, we raised money for children's charities.

Okay.

Eric: So she wanted hockey tickets to donate. And said, heck yeah, why not? Let's do this. And then I asked her out from there.

Chris Detzel: Okay that's all. So I just wanted to get a little bit of background. That's really fun. And it's a great story. And you guys moved to, you said Indiana, back to Indiana, and then, what?

Eric: We moved from Bakersfield, we moved up to Northern California for just a New York minute. We were there probably four months, five months. And then the Mavericks are what brought me to Dallas, an old boss, actually the boss I worked for in Indiana. He came to Dallas and was the VP of sales and marketing and asked me to come.

And I was the director of ticket sales for the Mavs, [00:11:00] 98, 99, and a part of 2000. And that's what brought us to Dallas.

Chris Detzel: That's quite interesting. It's funny as just a quick story, as I went to several years ago. One of the they were doing hiring or whatever for different types of people within, whether it's Texas Rangers, the Mavericks, whatever.

And one thing I learned there was I get invited to get some free tickets and then I didn't know exactly what it was, but it was a hiring thing. It's I'm going to find out. Like you said you start off in that industry and then you travel all over the place. Wherever they take you is where you're going to have to go, right?

Like you start off at Texas Rangers and then back. They no longer need you, but they have somewhere in Indianapolis, you can, or, it's just a big networking type of place and you can start out as like a ticket salesman, you know what I mean? And then be the VP of, there's opportunity, but you really have to start a lot of times from ground up from my understanding.

That's what I caught. And just from listening to you, it makes sense.

Eric: It's a [00:12:00] unique product. It's almost, to a certain extent, it's like running, you're selling a product. That you have no control over so you could, when I came to the Mavs, and basically if you're a losing team, they're the ones that usually need the help, especially on the skill side, because nobody wants to go but yeah, when I, our first year at the Mavs, we were 20 and 62, and the Stars won the Stanley Cup, and we're both playing in Reunion Arena, so nobody wanted to come to a Mavs game, everybody wanted to go to the Stars games and then

Chris Detzel: Not until Mark Cuban

Eric: took it over, man, that's really when it

Chris Detzel: obviously started taking off.

Eric: Yeah. A

Chris Detzel: year or two later.

Eric: I will give, you gotta give Pirogue Jr. some credit in that staff. They drafted Dirk. Yeah. Yeah. They traded for Nash, so they built Dirk, Steve Nash, and Michael Finley, that three headed monster, and it just kinda grew from there. But. Yeah. It was a great time.

Chris Detzel: All right.

Let's get in, let's get into the running piece. Sorry about that. That was very interesting. It's

Sharon: okay. It's like a marathon. Our life is like a marathon, basically. It is.

Chris Detzel: I love it. I love the background. It's and it [00:13:00] makes sense now that, just listening to the background to what you guys have, you guys started your own company, right?

I don't know how long ago it's been, but you now are on your left. And before, before you guys get into it, I love your title. So Eric is a chief running officer. And Sharon is a VP of Happy Running, and we have Han Solo, he's the captain, he's a dog, captain of the Millennium Running Falcons.

So this is great. Who made that up?

Eric: I share, I give Sharon all that credit. Thanks.

Sharon: I hope you like it. Yeah. If I made it up, it's good. If Eric made it up, maybe not. So I'm just kidding.

Chris Detzel: I think it's unique and I like it, so why not? You make up your own titles, why not? It's your company.

Eric: Baby Yoda's over your left shoulder, by the way, Sharon, okay, I'm Baby

Chris Detzel: Yoda. Oh, there you go, right on. What inspired you to start that company?

Eric: Opportunity. Like I said, the plan was not, this running business, very similar to the sports management piece. This was, we're [00:14:00] right place, right time, right opportunity.

So I, at the time I was working for run on, which is no longer there, it's Fleet Feet now, Wallace family. I was the marketing director for their four stores at the time.

Chris Detzel: I

Eric: think we had four races, Stashdown, Greenville, the Capel Stampede, and then Too Hot to Handle and Too Cold to Hold. And we were at.

Two, I want to say it was too cold to hold. And I was in, actually I was an employee of Ronon for probably a year and a half, two years, worked the floor. And then they needed help marketing. And I had sold another company at the time. And they asked if I could just, rather than be an employee, freelance and just.

An agency oversee the marketing. And so I, I said yes and just changed the relationship, but still there. So I, I want to say it was at too cold a hole. We were, had just gotten done setting up the expo and a young lady walked up to me and she's who's in charge of all of this?

And I was like I guess I am. And she's okay my name's Patricia. I'm with Jack Black Skincare Products and [00:15:00] we're looking for an agency that can help us launch our skincare line that we're gearing towards endurance athletes. And I was like, oh, I could do that. And so I can do that and came home and said, Sharon you're gonna have to quit your job because I don't know what I'm doing, but these people, and I got to go travel.

Wow. But so that's what started us and then the opportunity grew from there. I tell a story that how are we successful to start and I, it was Oprah Winfrey that that made us successful from the start because she announced she was going to run the Chicago marathon and. That basically more than doubled the running space in terms of demographics.

It was very much a male generated, male dominated sport way back then. Yeah. And it overshadowed her female following and it just. It went crazy from there. That's Lululemon got started, like all of the hundreds of dollars of Sharon, Sharon was spending on exploring cute clothes that all opened up and boom, it just the [00:16:00] opportunity was there.

And yeah, just Yeah.

Sharon: And I'll tap I'll make a nod to Luke's Locker. Cause it was Luke's Locker that had all the cute clothes.

Eric: Yeah.

Sharon: Everyone had all the great shoes and Luke's locker had the cute clothes.

Eric: Their Nike department was

Chris Detzel: insane. Yeah, their

Sharon: Nike department area was amazing.

Chris Detzel: By the way, Luke's locker went bankrupt five or six, I don't know, or going through bankruptcy. Yeah. And now they've made a huge comeback. And you go in and out and I love it. It's like actually probably the best local Dallas running store in my opinion that's there for now.

So it's interesting. Anyways, things change.

Sharon: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cyclical.

Eric: But then we just grew from there and just started taking on clients, whether it was a race or a brand that wanted to reach that endurance athlete or what we call an active lifestyle. I think it's just different because an endurance athlete are the people you've talked to, like the champions of the Dallas marathon, those are athletes that are running, two hour and 20 minute full marathons.

I'm not an endurance athlete, I'm an active [00:17:00] lifestyle athlete, I think like you, Chris, we like, we go out and run, we like to be competitive on our age group, or not,

Go to the event and have a good time, and then go do something else, because we're just active we we like that term better than endurance.

Chris Detzel: I'll say this is, all of the events that I go to that you guys host and put on, I love them, because, one is, they're just fun, it's like a party, two it's fun. Very, it's competitive and three is you have alcohol there most of the time. Not at all of them, I don't think, but a few of them.

And and I'm like, I thought I literally thought, and Leah got onto me, that you guys were race directors and in a way you are you're a, you're an agency that. Does the race directing for some groups, is that right? Or am I wrong? Like, how does that,

Sharon: how does that work? Yeah. So we've, I think we've evolved over time into what we are today, but initially I think we were more event marketing managers and brand managers that evolved into [00:18:00] race directing.

But at the forefront, I have a marketing background and event I used to be a sort for an event management company. So I did large corporate events and then Eric has the sports marketing background. And so we've melded all of that together and really focused on our clients and their brand versus, it's not about us and who we are really.

It's about our clients and their brands and the extensions of their brands through their partnerships too.

Chris Detzel: And I think that comes through. I think there's no doubt about it because sometimes you're like. Who runs this race? And we was like Eric is, or what, I was like, I'll see him.

I was like, oh, okay. But it's like a branded race, and it's pretty obvious and it's pretty cool. How many races from a running standpoint do you guys have here or that you manage?

Eric: So we did so last year we did 56 events. Across the country in Dallas in the Dallas Fort Worth area, our big clients are the Dallas Architecture Design Exchange, so that event's called the Forum Follows Fitness 5K.

That's a fun one. Uh, Pedacolis Brick Company, we [00:19:00] manage their Velvet Hammer 5K, Rahr Sons, we do their Oktoberfest 5K, MeCasino, we do their Mambo Miles, some of those are fun. That's one I like

Chris Detzel: a lot too.

Eric: Yeah, those are probably the top four that we, we did the DFW Airport 5k, we managed that for them this year for their 50th anniversary.

Clients come and go but those four have been our longest running clients in Dallas. And

Chris Detzel: do you guys, so that's interesting, so I didn't know this, so you guys are all over the United States. We do, yeah. Do you guys travel a lot? We

Sharon: do, so again, Cyclical, one of our biggest charities is called Zero Prostate Cancer, and we actually help them develop.

Their brand back, what, 10 years ago, probably,

Eric: a decade

Sharon: ago. And so at one point we had 25 races in 25 different cities all across the country that I pretty much spearheaded that at the time and took on the bulk of the travel, but we had 12 employees too. And several of our employees would travel to some, there was one weekend, I think we had [00:20:00] seven races all on the same weekend in different cities, all across the early East coast to West coast.

Yeah, it was madness. We did that and they've gone in the cycle up and down. And Eric took on the bulk of their events the last couple of years. So he was a traveling maniac and I got to get home and be dog mom.

Chris Detzel: Feels good. I'm sure. Yeah, a little bit. Yeah, that's so interesting.

So not all your events that you do are great runs or races.

Eric: Not, I would say coming out of COVID, they've all kind of transitioned to running. Okay. Prior to that, we were doing some cycling events. We were doing car show. We would consult on a variety of different things that, that were just events, whatever they might be.

But coming out back on a COVID, a lot of those didn't make it back. Yeah. And so everything we've been doing has been in the running space since then.

Sharon: Yeah. And seroprostate cancer is a run walk.

Chris Detzel: I run walk, run. I feel like most runs have some walks. From [00:21:00] either people are walking. Maybe they're not calling a walk or something.

But yeah, I see a book of Bruce Cruz Is that a running or says rides? So no on your website.

Eric: Oh a six pack trail ride Yeah, so we launched that we ran that for about four years or so. Yeah COVID maybe five years.

Sharon: Yeah, we thought it was a good idea to ride on bikes and drink beer.

Eric: I don't know,

Chris Detzel: man.

Until

Sharon: it became not so good. No, I'm just kidding.

Chris Detzel: So many people wanted to do it. They started getting drunk on their bikes. Yes,

Eric: that happened a lot. And yeah. I would say two

Chris Detzel: beers and I'm pretty tipsy,

Eric: it was we tried to control it as much as we possibly could. The rides were anywhere between eight and like 12 miles.

And at the end of the day it was, you got three pints of beer and then food at the end. But, we couldn't control everything that was happening at the breweries and then controlling people's bicycles and their maintenance and things like that. It just you learn, right?

The race directors that put on [00:22:00] triathlons and things like that, and I give them all the credit in the world. That is amazing.

Chris Detzel: It's a lot

Eric: of work, I'm sure.

Chris Detzel: Just think

Eric: about

Chris Detzel: this swimming piece and the biking and cycling and even, just for a full or whatever they did. It's going to cost somebody like, just as a per, me wanting to do it, it cost me 1, 100 or something, right?

And then I got to pay for the plane and try to get my stuff there, and just doing that.

Eric: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. As we've gotten smarter, we don't mind targeting the breweries and doing a 5k run and come back and get your, that's a little easier.

Chris Detzel: Are you guys still growing like crazy or is it just maintaining or how does that work?

Eric: Yeah, it ebbs and flows. We've been very fortunate very lucky in the places that we've been as a company. We really haven't had to do a lot of outside sales calls a lot of business that we've gotten. And I'll give all the credit in the world to the crew we work with. Sharon and all those folks, it's not me.

It's everybody that we work with that helps us put events.

Sharon: You don't give yourself enough credit, [00:23:00] Eric. It's you too. Come on.

Eric: All right. I'll take a look.

Chris Detzel: It's both of you, like I'm, sometimes one is going to do more than the other. It's just, this is great. All the connections that you felt over the years, just, I'm sure it's pretty cool.

Any kind of fun stories to tell Maybe even locally, like Mavs, Rangers, I don't know. Anything

Eric: fun? I'd say a couple of things we have a question that we didn't answer. So we're in 16 this year. Is that right? Yeah, 16.

Chris Detzel: Yeah. Yeah.

Eric: Wow. That's pretty cool. So we get our driver's license as a company this year.

Chris Detzel: Watch out, you have your permit now,

Eric: right? Yes. Yes. So you got to ride with somebody else. We've been lucky at some of the events that we've been able to produce. Right now for the season is college football playoffs. So that was really a fun event. We very first extra yard 5k that happened in Dallas, because that's where the national championship was on the BCS.

This college football playoff started. It was a

Chris Detzel: 5k right before it [00:24:00] or what?

Eric: They did, yeah starting in the Cotton Bowl, the original Cotton Bowl it won tickets to the game it was a big deal. From that, we've done NBA, All Star

Sharon: Game, 5K, that was fun. We always have stories, though, like we always have things that happen throughout the year, like We had one in Kansas City, I think, where a Portolet got knocked over in the middle of the night.

And so we were doing our route check in the morning right before the race and this Portolet slipped.

Eric: No, it was worse than that. It was a, we call it the hit and run Portolet story. So it was Kansas City and Brandon and I, the morning of the race, we're out just checking the 10k, checking the course in our car and The portalette was up on a berm so as we're around in the corner, we see, and it's dewy morning, so we see a few tire tracks, like car tire tracks go up the berm, and then there's blue plastic all over the place.

Wow. So the portal is gone. So [00:25:00] we saw this, we saw tire tracks going up there and then a destroyed portal that more man, we're gonna, we gotta walk up this hill and look down and if there's a car down there and, covered in blue portal and liquid. Wow. We were fortunate. We were lucky. There was not.

We saw the car tracks did go off a different direction, but somebody hit and ran that one.

Chris Detzel: What'd y'all do? Just you didn't really move it, right? Or could you?

Eric: It was destroyed. There was nothing left. It was, so we had a portalette company, United Reynolds or whoever it was, at five o'clock in the morning on a Saturday before the race, how do you get let's back out there for a prostate cancer charities?

And, so those portalettes are going to be used. So they're important, very important to Leslie. This is,

Sharon: Paying your vendors early and on time is very important in the industry. So they'll do you some Oh yeah. You need one.

Chris Detzel: Yeah. And you guys don't have control over that, do you? Do you manage the vendors too, or no?

Oh yeah. Oh, you do. Yeah.

Eric: Yeah. So you do. All right. [00:26:00] Some of our clients some of our clients, we do everything for them. It's basically Okay. It's

Chris Detzel: like you are the race director, in a way. But it's their brand that you do it with. Exactly. Yeah, it's

Sharon: like race directing on steroids or whatever.

Chris Detzel: Yeah. Yeah. It's basically like a race director. Doing all these races everywhere, you

Sharon: know. Running in these vitamins

Chris Detzel: are better. How do you, so you guys are doing a lot of these races. And one of the biggest opportunities from my experience in just working with other race directors is the volunteers.

How do you guys manage that? From every place you go to, what do you do?

Eric: Yeah, it's a challenging, honestly we do with all of our clients, we try to encourage them to hire temporary staff versus finding volunteers. Some of the positions for folks are super critical to the event.

And as much as volunteers are amazing, if you get a 50 percent show up, no show factor, it's just almost impossible to manage events without that. And you don't know until the morning of the event, like especially a lot of the water [00:27:00] stop people and course monitors and things like that. That's right.

Just don't show up. Yeah. Look at the Super Bowl in Dallas, the year of the freeze. They had so many volunteers that basically showed up, put their shirt on, walked into the stadium, went in the bathroom, took their shirt off, and enjoyed the game. Wow. That is, I'm not saying that's, we have amazing volunteers that help us.

We have a great core group of them that are always there for us and we,

Chris Detzel: yeah.

Eric: We treat them very well and give them great gear, shoes, all the stuff all throughout the year. But when you need 200 volunteers to oversee a marathon course you gotta ask for 400 or 500 and maybe you get 100 of them that show up.

In the clock in the morning when they got to be there. So it's a challenge. So we, we encourage a lot of people all of our clients, we encourage them to hire. And we go out and find temp staff. We use a temp agency that Okay, so you guys know, obviously. Yeah. Yeah. They've carved out a niche with them.

So they've been really good.

Sharon: Yeah. Or we, a [00:28:00] lot of our clients have internal like staff and volunteers that they can network with internally that they know the people and they know. Sally, they know her personally, so they know she's going to show up or whatever. So we encourage that as well.

Chris Detzel: Yeah. It's different because some of these race directors have volunteer kind of programs that you really have to build out. So it's another aspect of that entire thing. It sounds like you guys have some volunteers, but really push for Those folks to hire them or maybe use some internal people that might work out too.

Sharon: Yeah, which I think is great because it adds to the economy. There's a lot of event staff that need jobs and hours. And so it's perfect.

Eric: Yeah. And you need, if you're overseeing this whole volunteer program, you almost need a full time position to do that because you got to be engaged with them all the time.

Chris Detzel: It's funny because you guys have made a living out of this and I love what you're doing. It sounds like a ton of fun and a lot of work, obviously, but. I guess just have the background to do something like this, just really cool to see and there's not really many race directors ish, but that have that [00:29:00] background that I mean, you guys are all over the United States, it sounds so that's even another aspect of it.

So if you had to have volunteers for that. Yeah. Yeah.

Eric: It's, we were in 15 markets this year. So in different clients, so your volunteer, like for one event is tied to that specific charity and loves it, but you've got another event two weeks later that's in a different market.

That person's not going to volunteer there. Yeah. One of the things

Chris Detzel: that I, it seems like you guys only do five and 10 Ks. I'm not saying, ever. I think there's a half marathon balloon festival or when you, I don't, do y'all still do that one or

Sharon: We don't anymore. It doesn't

Chris Detzel: exist, but yeah.

Okay. Yeah. But that one had a half marathon too, but for the most part, the bigger parties in the kind of where the crowds are, in my opinion, it seems not to say, Hey, there are the Dallas marathons in the, the others, but, yeah. Not, those other ones aren't that big, like it's just like the 5Ks and 10Ks, you guys are pretty incredible, you know how to market that.

It's obvious. So you guys do a really good job. Is there like, is that [00:30:00] kind of a niche that you say, okay, 5 and 10Ks is about what we need to, or 10, 5Ks even.

Eric: Yes and no we've having managed the Plano Blue Festival for, we do that almost 10 years. Yeah. Yeah, there's also a party. Yeah.

It was.

Sharon: And the festival was, it was awesome. It was an awesome event. All in all. I'm

Eric: sure. But, I give credit to just very much similar to those triathlon directors and things like that. Closing 13 miles worth of road, 26 miles worth of road, that's a full time job. Especially in Dallas or any of the major markets, there, there can be a new construction project that the city's not aware of and doesn't talk down to the special events department and doesn't understand that the road's got to be closed on this day and you've got 5, 000 runners coming across and it can happen overnight.

And we see it in five days, like just the Form Files Fitness in downtown Dallas, we'll ride the course three days in a row before the event, just to make sure that, streets didn't decide, Hey, we're going to. We're going to put an end to all of this here and good luck to you. We've had that happen.

[00:31:00] We've waited to work through it and you got to make adjustments, but yeah, I think as we've gotten older we're a little bit, we've done mud runs. Just insane stuff. Just all kinds of stuff. Yeah. Got smarter and I'm not saying you shouldn't do it as an event director, if you can create the mass, a lot of work and having the amount of clients and the kind of the workload we have right now, I don't think we'd.

I don't think we'd be interested in overseeing a distant race like that, unless. It was a full time gig. Yeah, I was

Sharon: gonna say that too. I'd be open to managing a half marathon or a full, but that would be my only thing that I'd want to work on.

Chris Detzel: Yeah. Yeah.

Sharon: Because it is labor intensive.

And going back to the funny stories and volunteers there was one instance at the Plano Balloon Festival where I actually had volunteers out on the course at a very critical juncture in the half marathon. They called an Uber to come pick them up because they didn't want to be there anymore. So I see the Uber pull out and they're like getting in the car, driving away.

Chris Detzel: Oh my gosh.

Sharon: I was like, where are you going? [00:32:00] They're like, oh, we're done. Bye. I was like, you can't do that. Wow. So yeah, good times. That's insane. Yeah. So it's hard half marathon and longer is just so much. So much to manage so many different parts.

Chris Detzel: I look at like Dallas Marathon or BMW or whatever I mean literally they only have three staff members Overall now they have lots of volunteers and they have the I mean what they've done To me is pretty cool, but what I don't know if you remember this, but they brought in this guy from Disney and He brought that thinking around, Hey, let's do events throughout the year.

Let's have, make it this a three day event when we have the big event. And and he left and now, Marcus and team is managing that. And I think there's no other, there's no way they could do anything else as a job. It's only three people or so that kind of do all of the bulk of the work.

I'm not saying that they don't have president of this and that and [00:33:00] whatever, but so You know, especially that massive, could you imagine like Houston and Boston and all anyways, I'm sure you can, cause you've done a lot of stuff, but, that's just

Eric: doing a marathon has got to be tough

Chris Detzel: for

Eric: sure.

Yeah. I've had Marcus for years since the run on days. I watched him grow and watch the marathon grow as well. It's been, it's great for Dallas, very exciting. And I hope they continue. And I think to your point, they you got, you have to bring a party, especially to try to, to market to the younger demographic.

It has to be an event. It can't be go run, here's a banana and go home. It's, you gotta be avett in that one. I

Chris Detzel: agree. And you gotta make it a party. And they've done a good job. I used, I'll, I remember in 2013 or whatever, 14. I wasn't a big Dallas marathon, like I would go and I'm like it's not like a party.

It's just go and get a banana and stuff like that, but they've done a lot and it's really a great race [00:34:00] now. But it's to me, it's not, it's night and day. I remember going to Caltown and thought, man, this is the place. It's still a really good race. But, and I just, I've done that race for a long time to have, so, there's some good races, what they do want to ask Eric, which I'm a little, every time I see your Facebook, you have your tongue sticking out. Is that a branded thing that you do? I

Sharon: feel like a good person to ask that this week.

Chris Detzel: See?

Eric: And it's on a

Chris Detzel: podcast now.

Eric: He's like this. I'm not allowed to talk about open lawsuits against the Rolling Stones and their logo on camera, but no, I don't know where it started.

Just having fun, fun.

Chris Detzel: I could tell

Eric: you're

Chris Detzel: just having fun. I'm just asking what you knew. Now it's

Sharon: his brand. He has to do it all the time. People expect it.

Chris Detzel: Yeah. It's an ever picture. Anything that I missed that you guys should have asked or that you wanted to talk about more?

Eric: I would say, you brought De

We're really, we're sad that we're just two people though. And yeah. And no like I said, amazing volunteers. I look back at this year our [00:35:00] 56 events we produced we raised almost $2 million for charities. Wow. Through those, through all of those events we're excited about what 2025 is gonna look like.

We have some fun challenges coming up like the pedicolas and the velvet hammer. This mark, you've run that race, haven't you, Chris? I know Leah had a velvet hammer. I don't know. I've run

Chris Detzel: so many. I don't even know. You have to ask my wife. She just signs me up.

Eric: She signs you up there.

We both, I'll take the cover. Don't, but so we're launching their three years till their 10th anniversary. So we just launched their metal series and some red is with them and it might end up in a 10 K at the 10th anniversary and have that model or go out to breweries and done that.

When,

Chris Detzel: when's the, when's that race? That's

Eric: April 26th.

Chris Detzel: Okay. I dunno if I'll be in Bo when's, I have to think about when Boston is, but if not,

Eric: I think it's the week four. Boston. Okay. And then .

Chris Detzel: I think I can do that one. Leah, she's going to Boston [00:36:00] and go to London, but I'm not going to London. I'm just gonna go to Boston.

So that's Oh, wow. Anyways,

Sharon: both running the full or what? What?

Chris Detzel: Yeah she got into London. This, so she's been to Boston 11 times in a row. She's going back again for the 12th. But then London is the next week and it's her first time to get into London she'll just run it slow, but. It's exciting though.

Very exciting. Yeah. I wish I could go. I just was like, I can't do both, yeah. Boston it was. Um, this is cool.

Eric: Our first event of the year is Forum Files Fitness. I'll be there. You'll be there. This is the, this will be their 14th year so next year is 15.

You're talking about a race that's got 500 runners, very well supported by the architecture and engineering and design industry. They'll raise a quarter of a million dollars this year alone for the, it's called the Dallas Architecture and Design Exchange, which is a part of the AI Dallas the Architecture [00:37:00] Foundation of Dallas, and it raises scholarship funds for them.

Just amazing. I know a lot of those people that

Chris Detzel: work for those companies. Yeah. And there's this one guy, his name is Adam, and he thinks he's going to beat me in this race. And I was like, dude, I'm going to smoke you. So I hope he listens to this one because I'll be running that race just specifically to beat Adam.

So he's our, his company, he, his goal is to beat anybody in his company because they're all a big supporter of this race,

Eric: which which firm is he with? Do you

Chris Detzel: know? I have no idea. All right.

Sharon: But that race it's been a fun one to watch grow in that whole space in the running space.

It's kinda interesting,

Chris Detzel: Yeah.

Sharon: Yeah. Who knew

Chris Detzel: that? These architects that have the big race. Yeah. And

Sharon: even the kid, like the kids that come out, the track teams that come out, I'm always amazed. I'm like, this is is a runner's race, so many hardcore runners. I see. Yeah.

Eric: And managing the sponsors is harder than managing the runners because there's a hundred of them and I'm sure they're there, but I [00:38:00] love it.

A great relationships since we've been doing it since the beginning, great relationships with all those companies and that there's just so much fun to work with. But. It's

Chris Detzel: a,

Eric: It's a monster at the beginning of the year. So it makes us, shake the rust off a little bit for the year.

And then, and it's over in an instant. I think that's one of the amazing things about some of these 5Ks is you put your heart and soul into this thing. And most of the people engage with this product for maybe two hours time over the course of the year. Exactly. And then it's done. So stay relevant.

Like kind of what the Dallas Marathon has done, we follow that model too, with all of our clients. It's hard. It's hard because look how

Chris Detzel: many races there are. Everybody wants to put on a race and talk about a race, and staying relevant has got to be hard. And what I can tell from what you guys have done, it's pretty amazing.

And I like, and again I'll go back to that party atmosphere, but you go to Warren and Paula's Fitness, you have all these vendors, they're actually Giving, I don't know, you gotta give them, you gotta give your audience something and so they do, the swag is cool, like Mambo Myles, for example, I don't know when y'all [00:39:00] started that, but it's literally one of my favorite races for 5k, and I'm thinking it's I don't know what these guys are doing, but this is cool as hell, like we want to, like one time, like three, four, I don't remember, years ago, Leah ran it and she won all of women.

There's a thousand girls there, and she beat them all. Oh, it doesn't matter who showed up. I said you showed up. So it's cool, you

Sharon: know. Yeah. The tequila garden is epic for sure.

Eric: Yeah. Yeah. This is year five. Year five, yeah,

Chris Detzel: what could you do just in five years? I know,

Eric: like where did this come from and how's five years gone so fast?

So yeah. Yeah. It's insane.

Sharon: Yeah. I think Eric's point is, we have more like micro climate, micro clients and climates, but we have these smaller clients that, we put on these events for, and they're growing and that's been fun to watch because, one day one of our races is going to be 10, 000 people.

I'm hoping, and it's going to be amazing. Looking at some of the numbers, I had a friend that sent us a whirl of what's a publication, WSJ yeah. Sorry, had a [00:40:00] moment and they were talking about all the marathons and the number of people that ran this year. And, I think it was New York had 55, 000 that ran the marathon, which was a all time record.

So we're back on the up again after COVID. It's taken five years to do that. And I don't think people realize that it's taken that much time for everyone to build back from that. I didn't know that

Chris Detzel: either. I figured the first year or two was tough, but

Sharon: Yeah. It

Chris Detzel: does feel like it's growing more.

Sharon: Yeah. And so with smaller clients and smaller races, we have more pressure, right? Because we don't have as many big sponsors and big resources to pull from. So we literally have to watch our pennies and dimes and dollars. And with inflation, it's been a new challenge for us. It's okay, how do we keep all the things and make all the things fun and not raise prices that much, but still do the things that we need to do to make a profit for these companies?

Good point. Yeah. Yeah.

Eric: So I think for the industries, so Chris, my mom had, I had this conversation with my mom every time I call her, she calls me, how's business. And since [00:41:00] 2020 and the COVID years of 2020 and 2021, for all these event directors, for the events that have taken place, the companies that support them, timing companies, traffic control company, those sort of thing.

It wasn't just about losing those two years. And if you go back, look at stats, 2019 was a boom year for running. And obviously then it went, it was gone, but. You don't make up those two years by having one good year, it takes, you, you lost all of 2020, you lost basically all of 2021, and you need to have years that are good as twice what 2020 was going to be to make up for 2020, because you lost 2020 and the next year, and just because you had a good year in 2024.

You need all that lost revenue and those lost participants and that sort of thing. It needs to be doubled so you can make up for that year. Anybody that's listening to this, go out and run a 5k, 10k, whatever it may be. Run them all. Bring some

Sharon: friends,

Eric: bring some friends. Yeah.

Sharon: Yeah.

Eric: Also be cognizant of the economy.

Running is not [00:42:00] adverse to inflation. Everything costs more these days that, that we do. All the labor costs more, metals cost more, the shirts cost more the insurance. I hate to bring up a bad experience, but what happened in New Orleans, that's going to impact local 5k because the city, all cities are going to look at that and say, we need to.

You've got to improve these ordinances, you've got to do these requirements now, you need more police, you need all this sort of stuff. And that, that all costs, that costs money. Yep, police cost money. Yeah. Yeah.

Sharon: Or have your barricades and have your equipment, and bollards are expensive, they're not cheap.

Eric: Yeah. Inform Files Fitness, I've asked this on Facebook a few times, just trivia, just, I want to get people's perspective what do you think the police cost is for that? For that 5k race. It's 30, 000 for police. Wow, not that if you have a race of a thousand people at 40, that's 40, 000 you're only 10, 000 a head before, after you pay the police and you got everything else you got to pay for still the park, the, all this stuff, it's an interesting space to be in.

It is a business that, it and it's [00:43:00] all really small businesses from Dallas Marathon, three employees to us, two employees run project. I don't know how many folks they have and what that looks like after COVID, but Tana does an amazing job. Any of those folks that are out there, if you're a runner, walker, what have you, get out there and just go run a 5k and sign up and go have a great time.

Yeah. Absolutely. From all the race timers that we support, rental companies, staffing. The police,

Sharon: everybody.

Chris Detzel: Sharon, Eric, this has been great. We actually went an entire hour almost. This is crazy. It's awesome.

Sharon: Thank you. It's been fun. It was good.

Chris Detzel: Yeah. I enjoyed it. It was great. Thank you everyone for tuning in to another DFW Running Talk.

I'm Chris Dutzell and Eric, Sharon, thank you again for coming on. Really appreciate it. This was awesome. Thanks. Thanks

Sharon: for having us. Don't forget to

Chris Detzel: rate. Happy New Year, everybody. And don't forget to rate and review us. Thank you.