Today at the merger of the dirt podcast episode number 30, we're gonna talk about an article I read in dirt rag by a gentleman named Ben Davis, where he explains
the approach you need to build a better relationship with your trail steward organization, and this approach will help you get into places that you've ever been before If you've been stopped, if you've been blocked, if you've been told no, you'll never race there ever, ever, ever, then you're gonna wanna listen to this episode. Because I'm gonna show you how you can turn a no into a yes.
Greetings. I am your local neighborhood recreational engineer, Kyle Bondo. And as the in here. I'm here to help make the art and science of race promotion understandable and simple for those race promoters who didn't major in business. Today, I wanna talk about an article I read in this month's edition of dirt rag mountain bike magazine. Now, this is issue 199. And in it, is a story written by Ben Davis. And the story is titled Access Tomorrow,
sometimes comes, Flood becomes a catalyst for beautiful partnership. And the reason why this story kind of jumped out at me is what happened in a small little place called Golden Colorado, which is just west of Denver. But Golden Colorado has a special little place because it is what he refers to as a mountain bikers town, which is a fantastic idea to think about places like Davis,
West Virginia, or like that. And there's a, you know, the lab is probably like that and probably Bend, Oregon probably has that connotation as well. But in golden Colorado, not only do they have hundreds of miles of accessible trails for hikers and and equestrians and for mountain bikers, but they also have a community that understands the needs of trail users and trail participation. So the community is very active in making sure the trails are maintained and are
used pretty much by everybody in the area. And they have they have quite a an assortment of them. I think they have a steep and tuck technical dissents, something in the things called the apex and the enchanted forest and the chimney mulch and the Mustang. Mean, these are all really kind of kind of interesting
trail names where people can ride and in fact people do, locals do. Ride 4 or 5 times a week because the trails come right off the main town. So you can go and actually ride your mountain bike, ride if you get off of work, by going behind the place you work and riding up the hill and off you go to 1 of these trails. So this is this is an interesting place. Okay? And Ben Davis kinda sets the stage for for Golden Colorado and the mountain biking scene. But then he starts to talk about
but before and the after. And today, we're going to talk about relationships. Relationships is an important part of any race promotion business, and really the requirement for getting permission to use property. So any trail system needs this kind of relationship, this relationship with the community with the users of the trail and the ability to come together. So Ben Davis paints this picture of Golden Colorado previous to 2013
in which it wasn't really like that. And he talks about how the mountain bike, potentially the community in that area, was carrying the same reputation and baggage as skate borders have been dragging around. They were considered, as he says, and a, quote, disrespectful
jerks that do not care how badly they impact the trail user during their rides. That's what a lot of people thought amount of bikers in that area. So enter the other player in this in this scenario. And the other player is a group called the Jefferson County Openspace or Jcos. And there are 40 plus year old organization that
is designed or was designed by politicians to help take care of the land, help take care of these trails. Okay? So the J cause is an organization designed to take care of 236 miles a trail. And if you've ever done any kind of trail maintenance, fix the corner, taking out a tree. You know that just a couple miles of trail is a lot of work. These guys do 236
miles worth of trail. Okay. So that's a big chunk of land. That's a lot of trail to maintain. So when you're an organization that has to maintain, that kind of short, that cut that level trail. You either need a a lot of money to have a big staff or you need a lot of volunteers. And this article goes on to talk about how the sales tax in that area funds this organization. So they've really not had a need for volunteer support or fundraising. They get basically public assistance. So they're subsidized by the government to do all this trail maintenance, which if you're a trail, if a trail person, if you're an equestrian, if you're a hiker, and even if you're mountain biker in that area, that's a good thing. Well, the problem in Golden Colorado
is the design of the trails. They have or at the time, they had trails. They had long straightaways. And if you're here any kind of connoisseur of trail design. You know that long straightaways for a mountain biker are fantastic. Because you can hit 25 miles per hour, fly down the side of a mountain, it's basically a downhill event. Well, in an area where you have hikers and horses, a 25 mile an hour to send it a mountain bike is
not a good thing. You're talking hikers and horses, you see a mountain bike come flying down the hill, and there are problems. Now, horses and hikers like the straightaway because that's the course, the the the perfect distance between 2 points. Horses enjoy that kind of long, long lingering straightaway to kind of cobble down a hill. And hikers get, you know, get to where they need to go as fast as they can. However, for a trail designed with mountain bikes, That doesn't work so well. You have these guys bombing down the trail where hikers and and horse riders are and every effort of the mountain bikers in that area to change this trail design to make it a better trail system was met with nose. In fact, he talks about how anytime they try to do anything with the trails, the answer was no. They knew the best way. They knew how to do their trails. Mountain Bikers are considered where mountain Bikers are considered in a lot of places. They're the problem. They don't have solutions. They're the ones who cause the problems. The horse people and the hiker people. They're perfectly. They're saints. They're angels. Mountain bikers. That's the, you know, they're the devil incarnate. So the reputation still precedes them. So any kind of challenges, the trails, they weren't being allowed. Well, enter 2013.
And in 2013, Mister Davis talks about the slow moving cold front stalled out over their area and dropped 17 inches of water, which is their equivalent to their average rainfall. In just a a few days. Now if you're familiar with with flooding and the flood damage, you'll know that 17 inches of water in just a few days is a lot of water. The average rainfall is, you know, in the half inches or quarter inches,
it's tiny, and that's a lot rain is like 1 inch or 2 inches. That's a lot of rain. 17 inches in just a few short periods of time is it's biblical. So needless to say, this rain damaged everything. It wrecked houses. It damaged roads. It and, of course, it blew out just about every rail in the area. So they lost their backyard. These 236
miles worth of trail were completely wiped away, So they had this huge problem. The trails were completely wiped out. And so they they came up with a plan. They knew that the the J cause with what funding they had would never be able to get 230
some odd miles a trail back in check, not within within a short period of time. For taking years. And when you have big old disasters like this, a lot of times, recreational funds are rated to help take care of more important things like power and sewer and water, things that people need to live off of. They're not gonna spend that kind of money on trail maintenance. So they're gonna use this to fix their roads. They're gonna fix probably animal wildlife gating. They're gonna need to be able to get water moving in and out. So this is brutal. This is brutal. Scenario. I mean, this this storm that happened really took a mountain biking town from a mountain bike town to just a town because the storm had destroyed just about everything. So think about That scenario. You have mountain bikers who no 1 likes, a trail system that no 1 wants to change, and then the unbelievable happens. This giant flood rolls into Golden Colorado, and now you have an opportunity. You might think an an opportunity. What do you mean by opportunity? This sounds terrible. Well, it is terrible. And in the article talks about that, you know, they they had to recover from all this rain. Right? And and they patiently waited for J cause to start to get into action. Unfortunately, we're talking about a situation
where government organizations have higher priorities and other geo government organizations,
their money gets taken from them to serve those higher priorities, which makes sense because that's what government should be doing, should be prioritizing their money, shouldn't be spending it on frivolous things, especially during a disaster. So so Mister Davis, after waiting a few months, goes and talks to his friend Al Head, who's his neighbor. And Al Head is this bike guru college professor. And they started come and go with an idea of
figuring out how they could help even if it was just time and muscle at the very least. So they decided to take some of that that energy and initiative, and go to the J cause staff and say, how can I help you guys? You guys are overwhelmed, obviously. Trails are in disarray,
obviously. We've waited a couple months. The worst part of it's over People are starting to recover. Now it's time to get our town back together again. How can we help? And the first thing they did was just reached the handout. I mean, the J caused staff because, you know, because of the the devastation of a of a major flood like this, well, remember they were well funded before They did need volunteers. Well, now they needed volunteers more than ever. So the volunteer help was very appreciated. So the relationship
starts to form there. Simply by people giving giving themselves of their time, of their muscle to come help them and to fix things that they love. And I think about it is these J cause people probably love the trails too. Now they have to do trails for all. They have to think about the big picture. But together, they start to form this relationship, and this relationship fundamentally changes
the way they look at mountain bikers. Why is that? Well, first off, they get to meet a few. Now we all know when we go mountain biking, we all know that there are the bad apples. There are the few people who ride the trail who just don't care. Hikers too who throw garbage out, who, you know, eat the eat the meal and move on and leave their wrappers everywhere or leave their water bottle, you know, cigarette butts. You know, hikers do the same thing. Horseback riders. Now they say that horse poo and all that stuff is is natural. You know? Ride your mountain bike through it. And put your mountain bike in your garage.
That's a special kind of smell. But horseback riders, they eat lunch, and they throw stuff off the side of their horses too. They're not all perfect. So when you meet people face to face, when you look them in their eyeballs, you learn a few things. The first thing you learn about is that they're not monsters. That mountain bike riders are people who love the trails too. You start to remove these stereotypes. You start to understand
the people who are involved in your community who wanna use these trails and mountain bikers by forming a relationship with these kind of trail organizations really start to undo the damage done by BMX or BMX in the eighties is all, you know, all about attitude and right on sidewalks and and then the nineties, the skateboarding, boom, and then a combination of the 2, and the loitering, and kids,
and riding your bike on the side rail of stairs and jumping off of curbs. That's the kind of view that that a lot of people have the mountain bikers. And then you have the people who go out and hike a trail and who go and and ride their horse and have mountain bikers come bomb and pass them with no care in the world, no passing on the left. None, and scare the horses, ever been around horse people. When mountain bikes show up, they get really nervous. Because you have to think about it, they're sitting on a £1000 animal. Number 1. And a mountain bike machine.
I mean, if you've ever seen your dog act weird when you're like fixing the wheel and you're doing like your chain maintenance, my dog goes bananas when the back tire spins. I have no idea why. He's a bulldog, so what do you expect? But the back tire is spinning. I'm putting a little lube on the chain, and he goes bananas. He wants to kill it. So imagine that's a dog. Well, none of the Indians call horses. Right? They call them. They're basically big dogs, but horses are uneasy around machines.
Just to begin with. And a mountain bikes come rolling up. It's a threat. It's fear. It's it's usually irrational.
And you have a person sitting on top of that beast as you come bomb and buy. Of course, there's gonna be a lot of tension, a lot of stress. So this is the relationship. The flying past the high the hiker who's got his earbuds in. He can't hear you say passed on the left. Now it says, you know, the whole mountain bikers are jerks. But then there's tons of times where the mountain bikers who just don't say anything come by and by. These are problems. And this has created a reputation. The reputation has preceded itself. So In this article, Ben talks about how they went to the Jefferson County, and they said, hey. We wanna help. We want to help fix our trails. And we know that you guys are slammed with doing other things and that your funding is probably gone, and we wanna help you. So that's what they did. They decided to to join forces and by showing up and by volunteering and actually doing some of the work they needed to get done, they form this relationship. And they formed this relationship that allowed them to do some cool things. The first cool thing that they were allowed to do is they wanted to take on their volunteer management.
And what do I mean by that? Well, so at the time, Jacos did things when it came to volunteers the same way that most volunteer organizations do. They have weekend trail maintenance days. So if you're if you're per parent
or you have a full time job, spending your whole Saturday doing trail maintenance is rough. Right? Got family time. The only time you have is the weekend, and then they wanna do trail maintenance. And trail maintenance happens on an all day Saturday or all day Sunday. That's rough. Especially if you got kids. That's rough. So the first thing they did is they they organized with the Jcast folks to not have to do only Saturday or Sunday works.
Trail work. They wanted to do a couple hours on weekdays.
So they could go off, you know, come off of their job or come off earlier, take a lunch break. And go to a particular part of the trail and and help fix that. That was the first the first big change. The second thing they asked to do after they formed this relationship and after they've done some volunteer time, was some of the bigger sections of trail that had been problem areas. Remember we talked about that 25 mile an hour bombing down the hill and passed horses and hikers. They wanted to rebuild that to allow it to have a little bit more flow and chunk it out so that would reduce the conflicts with other users.
So rather than the long straightaways, you do switchbacks,
you remove your you change the flow of the trail, so you can see people down the road, but you're not doing 25 miles an hour past those people. So you're allowed to change the trail. So they're allowed to work on the weekdays, and they're allowed change the trail. And it didn't happen overnight. This is something he points out. Didn't happen overnight. But with all sorts of meetings and conversations for weeks months and the hours he spent on the trail demonstrating their commitment
to a healthy park system, their relationship, and he says, and I quote, grew deeper and more trusting. And that's really kind of the the the gist of this episode is the forming of a relationship with trail maintenance and with park service is vital to running a racing business and doing kind of a race promotion.
And I'll tie this all in because he talks about how Tom Hobbie, the director of Jacobs, began to openly discuss ways to improve the trails and incorporate their riders in their planning sessions for the first time mountain bikers were invited to be a part of the conversation.
Especially when it came to a member, they've got 230 some odd miles of trail and the storm destroyed all sorts of things. They have some big planning too. They have some big changes they need to make. 1 thing a storm does is it it it exposes the weaknesses you have in your trail system, where the water constantly pulls up or where the water constantly destroys the trail. So The first time the Jacobs, people want the mountain bikers in the conversation.
So just simply by showing up, by building the relationship, by being a active member in that community, by helping them at the time of need, and by providing your assistance, but then also by going providing some insight and to say, hey. You know all those problems we have? This is an opportunity. We could fix these problems. We could reduce some of the stress on the trail, and everyone's happy. And then be invited in the conversation of future talks.
This is what building a relationship does. This is how you get a community to see you as a benefit to the trail and not a hindrance to the trail. So what do they do? So that fall, they reopened the trails, and they had created a 1000 hours worth of work through a 100 volunteers to help over reopen these trails. So 2013, they have this massive devastating flood, and that fall which is an incredible
short period of time. With a 100 of my volunteers, they reopen some of these trails. Hundreds of new volunteers that the organization never had before. Volunteers too, which you remember the word volunteer, they're not getting paid for this. So this is labor and force and projects in which Jacobs was able to achieve minus the funding they lost because of the flood issues. So what's a group to do? Now that they have proven that they can volunteer
and be worthy partners at the table to have the conversation, the planning of trails. Well, mountain bikers do, what mountain bikers do, they ask if they can erase it. Now you're thinking, I was like, well, that's a twist. Right? Well, hear me out here. So prying with this success of what they did to help them open some of these these trails. They went back to the Jacos, the administrator, Mister Hobbie, and off offered to make the same effort next year, if they closed the mountain bike trail they just finished for a race. If you let us race this trail, We're gonna do the exact same thing to the next trail next year to another trail the next year and the year after that. We'll continue to help you fix the trails.
If you allow us to close a trail and have a race, which is something they never do. They never close the trails to any group. Much less mountain bikers. Remember mountain bikers were the the bane of everyone's existence. And this is the time in which which he talks about how they heard no, a 100% more than they heard yes. But the only yes that mattered was the JACAS Organizer. And lo and behold, because of the relationship they built, because of how they put themselves
at his disposal to to fix those trails and become good stewards of the trail. He trusted them. And because he trusted them, he said yes. So he talks about how they brought in Jen Barber, who's the director of team Evergreen, and Mike Millison, who joined Alhead, and Ben Davis, to form a trail stewardship program. Number 1. So the trail stewardship program becomes the volunteer corps
for where they're gonna go forward building and fixing the trails and helping Jcos manage those trails. So that becomes their organization. To organize their their volunteers around, and Jacobs becomes the beneficiary of that. And then they go and form a bike race called the Golden Giddyup, which is now an annual event. So if you think about the flood that happens in 2013 and they fix the trails in 2013, and then they go in film organization
for trail stewardship. They get hundreds of volunteers that come in. They join forces with some other some other organizers. And then in September of 2016, they have their first event. Now think about that. So think about the timeline there. So that they're hated pre 2013. 2013 of flood happens. They volunteer. They put their time and effort and labor into it. They start to organize volunteers.
They create a new relationship with an organization that was not very fond of them. They start to to form relationships with other trail stewarders stored groups, horses, the questoring people, the hikers. They start to remove the stereotype. They show up. They do the work. They They provide some insight
into how the trail could be fixed to help alleviate problems and reduce stress. They get invited to the table when it comes to planning and future activities, they bring an organization of volunteers to help with the next year's worth of trail maintenance, and it's still 3 years
before the Golden Giddy up actually happens. So that's a relationship building process that you can actually you can actually think about and cultivate in your own race promotion business that you could actually go and find a group organization
that may or may not like mountain bikers and start volunteering is really the core piece of this doesn't have to be a disaster. You don't even have trails as wiped out. However, it wouldn't be very hard to go find some trails that are wiped out. So that is the scenario to help cultivate a relationship They can get you access to places you might not have any access before. That if you can form this trust, you can actually get park managers or organizations
that maintain trails truth trail streetership to get you to either help you get a permit for an area to race. Or be the facilitators of that permit process. That's how you do it. You give of yourself, you help fix the trail, You help clean up the area.
You you show up. You be present. They know who you are. They see you all the time. It's not a 1 and done. It's not something you show up and do a couple shovel folds and you clip some weeds and say, Woo hoo, I'm awesome. Trust me. No. Think about this. Think about Ben Davis and Al Ed, and what they had to do to cultivate their trail street leadership relationship with Jacobs and Mister Hobby They had to go for 3 years before the first race took off. Now yours your efforts might not be that long, but if you think about it, that sounds about right.
You know? If you're if you're kind of the bad boys of the trail, it's gonna take a it didn't take some time before they finally believe that you're gonna show up. The 1st year, it got a flood. People are highly motivated. Everyone goes and helps out. Okay? Floods last year now. Now it's 2014's thing of the past. And that's usually where the enthusiasm
wears off. But now these guys these guys maintain that enthusiasm. In fact, now they maintain enthusiasm. They brought in hundreds of people. They got people organized. Because the other mountain bikers, when they see this relationship forming and they see the door opening where They can be represented just as well as the horse people and the tiger people. They show up. It's been my experience
where I live too. People will show up. You start to you start to believe in what you're doing. You start believing that trails we use for all and building and fixing parts of the trail because you know the park doesn't have the money for it or the staff to do it. The only way to make it done if you do it, and you keep riding over the same section of trail. It's Rudy and nasty. Only way that's gonna get done. Only way that's gonna get done is you're gonna have to go do it. You're gonna have to go out there and fix that trail. When you fix that trail, people are gonna see that you fix that trail. I'm gonna thank you for it. Some of them, a lot of them. But they're also gonna see something else. Gonna see you're out there. You're gonna start asking questions. Get interested. They wanna help too. People fundamentally
want, especially mountain bikers want the trail to be better. They wanna ride over that junk parts,
the Rudy parts. I mean, I'm not talking about, like, the Rudy parts that are fun. I'm talking about the Rudy parts that are not fun. You know, the ones you gotta get off your bike and push up because there's no way you ride that safely, but that's that's the gist of that of this process. That's forming this relationship. Now you think about it. So you go back to the Golden Giddy up, and their first race saw 450 riders make call that said an Enduro
Undo, which I think is a really cool name, Enduro. But they had 3 time climbs and 3 time descends over 27 miles. And it'd be like a 35100 feet elevation change. And then on top of that, they had REI come out and be a sponsor. They had yetty cycles be a sponsor, and they even had because they have all these local breweries in Golden Colorado.
They had laws whiskey be 1 of their top 3 supporters. So you've got local businesses start to understand that by bringing the mountain bikers and the working relationship that's been going on by fix seeing their town and fixing their trails. Sponsors
and other community members start to notice this as well. When more mountain bikers start showing up, and start buying merchandise and start buying things in their shops, they start to see that mountain biking is no longer this kind of like offshoot, fad kind of bad boy kind of thing. This is a real business, and racing is a real business. And recreational activities with mountain bikes can be a real business and sponsors and vendors and local businesses understand
that the local connection between mountain bikers can help their business. So you get these kind of these kind of things where they they talk about their supporters or things like earthtrex and scratch labs and feedback sports and Jeffco Outdoor Foundation.
All help. And what they did is they they made the race. They made the race about a charity, and the charity was their trail's leadership efforts. And they made their race about their trail leadership to help fund their efforts because you gotta buy tools, you gotta have water. I mean, cold in Colorado in the summertime is probably really warm. Don't know. It's Colorado. High altitude. Yeah. Give or take. But you need those kind of things. You need the, you know, dirt and rock and the kind of things that maybe you just can't get other other organizations to buy or takes forever to buy. Well, during their their their golden giddy up race, this in Durando,
they raised $60,000
for trail of street ownership. That's a lot. And not like that, they cut the laws of whiskey people that donate a barrel, their pricey, perfect whiskey for riders at the finish line as their as their treat. So if you're a whiskey drinker, this is even a better deal as you go out and help you go out and help build a trail rebuild your community, you get to race that trail, and the money you pay for race that trail goes to help build more trails and better commute better your community. And then at the finish line, you get a shot at whiskey. So with a good whiskey, that's not a bad deal. So they form this partnership. So you this relationship starts off. With this trust. You have to break this trust barrier. You have to be you have to show up and be present because you can't be partners. If you no 1 trusts each other. That's true in love. That's true in racing. Is partnerships and life too? Is you if you can't trust somebody, then there's no there's no point in working together. So now with all this money, not only do they do they use this to help for
for trail stewardship, but they've also been able to employ a professional trail builder to manage their weekly strudgers distributorship efforts. So they created from this. No 1 likes me on the trails. To now they have professional trail builders. They have this relationship with Jacobs where their community now sees them as a benefit.
They've raised money. And they have an influx of new volunteers because of it. So they kinda rallied their community together, but they had to make the first move. They had to be the ones to reach out. They had to weave the be the ones to help change the relationship, help change the perception of what mountain bikers are. You can't expect people to change the idea of who you are. Because their idea of what mountain bikers are and the way that that the off road sports is perceived
is crazy wacko dudes who and gals who don't obey the rules, who ride when it's wet, who blow past horses, who don't care about anything. That stereotype is everywhere. And, of course, you know, the reason why there's stereotype is some of it's true. Some people are like that. But you had to fix that because you have to go back to that, you hearing no over and over again. The only way to fix that no all the time is you have to remove those obstacles. You have to overcome all this negativity
by forming the right approach. And Ben Davis in this article in dirt rag helps cribe how this approach is done in a real world example. I mean, it talks about how the trust has grown deeper and more vibrant every year. That they become fans of their work. So they succeeded where others have repeatedly failed because
they reached out. They don't wait for people to come to them. They reached out. And now their backyard trail is something that they can look at and say, we built this there's no longer this this this animosity between each other. They have they have they have now broken
down the barriers. They've looked each other in the eyeballs. They've had a conversation. They've talked to each other. They've done things together. Actions speak louder than words. They've physically gone and done the work they said they would do. They built the trust over time. And when that trust is built and when that relationship is formed, and you actually become real partners,
that's when you discover that you can do things that you were previously told that will never happen. You'll never have a race there. We'll never authorize that. There is no way it can't be done. Well, Ben Davis proved it could. The Golden Giddy up happened 2016. Happened in 2017. This event happens. This is a place where it raises like that just never happened, and now it does. So
think about that. Think about your relationship right now with your Trail Stewart or your park manager or your property organization. Think about your relationship. Think about your relationship with equestrian people. Think about your relationship with hikers. Think about your relationships that you currently have with your racing business, where you wanna go. And think about these kind of these asymmetrical ways of getting people to
understand what it is you do, and stop thinking that they need to change first to their fault. It's their problem because it's not. To our problem as an off road racing community. It's our problem to change their minds that we are not a threat that we are normal people like everybody else. We just happen to like a type of sport. They just don't understand. So we help them understand it. We help them understand that we're just as big as trail stewards and conservationists
as they are. But you can't do that. And if you go Only you go ride by yourself and you never go hell through trail maintenance. You can't do that. If you never show up to any of the meetings, you can't be a partner if you're not present. So think about that. Put that thought into your head of how you can in your community
reach out and start to form a relationship with people who maintain the trail. They're everywhere. There is a trail maintenance going on everywhere. And if it's not going on somewhere, then maybe you need to initiate
it going on somewhere. It doesn't cost a lot of money to go down to Home Depot or Lowe's and get some dirt and get some rock and go fix a corner or go fix a a a small patch. Doesn't cost a lot of money to take a couple shovels out to a trail and go build some drains and get rid of that puddle that never goes away. It doesn't take a lot of money to go out to a trail with your clippers and clip back a lot of that those sticker bushes or the poison hook or the him lock or the the poison ivy or the the tree that just has never been taken care of. Doesn't take a lot of money to do that. Don't need a chainsaw. You can take an axe out and take care of that fallen tree or the limb. A lot of times with trail maintenance, these people got they've got minimal funding and minimal staff, and they never have time to do a lot of these things. So they depend on volunteers and people to help maintain this the trails themselves. Doesn't take doesn't take much to go, you know, ride your bike in an area, see where it's all messed up, put your bike back on the car, and go walk that trail again, and knock the sticks out of the way, clip back some bushes, shovel out of drain. You can do this. So go see how you can build a relationship
with these people, with these different groups, and start participating, start joining them in their trail maintenance efforts. I I promise you. I promise you. By showing up and being present and constantly showing yourself as a good steward of the trail.
Their perception of who you are and what you do will change. Because they'll have a real face and a real name behind a sport they don't understand. And they'll start asking questions. They'll start seeing you as the face of that sport and not the person who blast to pass them on the trail. They'll see that as an as an aberrant of of some sort of like anomaly. They'll start to understand
that you represent the sports, and that is not the norm. You are the norm. That's how you change perceptions, but you have to initiate that. So I challenge you to go out there and Find an organization and volunteer for it. Go do a trial day. Go meet the people. It's hard work, but it will have big rewards. Go introduce yourself to these people, go work with these people, and help start the conversation, help start building relationship. Follow Ben Davis'
process in this article and take it as gospel. He is telling you right here how it's done. He's telling you the process. And like I said, it's it's a high level, just a lot of missing pieces, a lot of probably some tough times in there. They probably didn't accept him right away. I mean, it took from the time there was the flood to the time there was a race was 3 years. So this is the approach to how you build better relationships and get a no, turn to a yes. And now you know.
Do you wanna build your 1st race or need help making races better? I'm sure where to start. Well, today's sponsor is Rechinir, and [email protected]
is for you. Rechinir is the number 1 resource for race promoters who didn't major in business. And the result is over a 100 free lessons, strategy, and tools to give you a better way to build off road and endurance races. Enjoy some of the best lessons learned in event design, race management, and race promotion that will help you grow your business and give you a place to start on the path of becoming a successful race promoter. Reckonier can also partner with you to help get your race off the ground. So go to reckonier.com/start
and learn more about what Rechinir can do for you to help you build better races. That's rechinir.com/start. Thank you for me to the Merchant Center podcast. If you have a question or comment or you wanna tell me about how you plan on reaching out to your Trail Stewardship Organization and cultivating that relationship, please hit me up at [email protected]
or on Twitter at merchant jerk. I appreciate you listening. I appreciate you subscribing. Please go to iTunes and leave a review. I'd love to hear from you. Or if you just wanna reach out and say, hey, how are you doing? Have a question have a comment or an idea for future episode, let me know. As always, thank you very much for listening to the merchandisinger podcast. You can find me at merchazedir.com. Atreckonier.com.
Meanwhile, I hope you take what you learned today and go build better races. Take care.