Here is everything you need to know about Guest in 2019!
For some background, a Guest entry is a single Stage entry to a week-long event. Those considering the Ultimate often join us for a single Stage to get a feel for the event, the community, and the course. we highly recommend it. It’s a high value just based on the cost-to-food ratio alone! It is also a good way for any community members to stay involved if, for example, they are not entered in the Ultimate event in any given year.
Since our week-long Ultimate event has experienced significant growth since 2018, and given our sell-out for 2019, we are going to need to make some changes to Guest participant with caps in 2019.
The Guest event participant caps for 2019, by Stage: 30 – 0 – 10 – 20 – 10 – 0 – 40
Our top priorities are to maintain the participant experience, while continuing to keep the event open through these flexible entries.
In terms of participant experience, we will almost certainly have many more runners across all events than ever before, and so we will check the growth of the entire event through Guest. These caps will deliver the maximum number of runners that we believe we can support to our standards in 2019. Most significantly, we are removing the Guest option from the two Time Trials, Stages 2 and 6. Those two in particular are taxed by participant levels and we see this as a necessary step in 2019.
Our parallel priority is to continue to provide this opportunity, and so we have set healthy caps that will allow for a reasonable number of runners. For context, the 2018 Guest signups as a percentage of 2019 caps are: Stage 1: 57%. Stage 3: 50%. Stage 4: 60%. Stage 5: 60%. Stage 7: 68%.
The end result is that we could still see more Guests than ever before, but only to these determined levels. These caps will be enforced. We are happy to announce this more than five months out from the event.
The remaining spots are available directly in Race Roster a few clicks into the registration process. Screenshot from March 2, 2019:
Further points:
– Guest runners earn a finisher medal only at Stage 7. No other Stages involve medals of any kind.
– Guest is separate from Relay; if you want to take the Guest experience up a notch, you can still run just one Stage while finding six friends to fill out the rest of the team!
– Ultimates who withdraw but still choose to run as Guests will not be admitted to Stages 2 and 6.
Pictured: Dorothy Skonieczka and Bryan Yeung. Bryan ran two Guest Stages in 2018, and both are back for Ultimate in 2019.