We are closing out another year with gratefulness for this community showing up strong through the year! Looking ahead to the 2025 race schedule and series options to help keep you motivated, we also want to highlight updates and explain a few principles we plan by.
What’s new this year?
It’s exciting to expand the Thursday evening summer races to include entirely new distances and courses. You may remember scrambles of the past…while we’re starting/finishing two of the Riverfront events in similar places, courses will be published ahead and set to the distances of 5K and 4 Mile. The brand new event on the other side of the river in East Hartford will allow us to get in a 5 Mile experience. The Riverfront Summer Series will include a custom quarter-zip for series participants, a different spin to upgrade the race experience.
With only so many weekends in the season, and the challenging reality of staffing and enlisting volunteers to support race events, we’re mindful of what can be added without taking away events you know and love. We published the schedule to open up registration on January 1, but do know there are elements to events and some new ideas still being worked on.Our hope is to provide opportunities offering competitive runners, those at different paces who prefer varying distances, newbies and walkers the encouragement to set longer-term goals. The variety of multi-event challenges is intended to help you take an interest or commitment in one event and expand it to others, with some additional support and motivation along the way.
Of note for back-of-pack runners, we’re also trying to cater more to what that experience feels like in locations we can accommodate longer course limits. As such, multiple options exist to keep motivated through the season, including Lucky Challenge and Li’l Lucky walker-friendly events in March. The new HMF Sampler has great options for various distances and for walkers. As well, the end-of-season Sleigh the Ks challenge can easily be made to suit a variety of run or walk pace goals.
Expect a new community engagement program at our Mystic Half Marathon & 10K, allowing participants opportunity to support local charities and ensuring supporters and volunteers can get expanded access to this typically sold-out race experience.
If you want to get a deal on race pricing, you have to register early! It’s as simple as that.
Outside of the weeklong early pricing sale from January 1-7, each event pricing structure is based on its own timeline. Early registration patterns give us an indication for planning logistics, but if we over-estimate too much, wasted resources become a concern (i.e. excess medals, wrong size race shirt inventory, logistic overspends, etc.).
We do our best to plan all of those necessary resources in advance with some flexibility for growth.
What does “sold out” actually mean?
Given a number of events sold out in 2024, we want to explain a few things. First off, know that we don’t like shutting anyone out of a race field, we want you there! It becomes necessary to close registration when we hit established capacities though to ensure that everyone who registered previously has the services, swag and experience they signed up for. Overselling on an event risks taking those away, and in most cases, it’s not even possible to safely accommodate last-minute changes since important aspects like police staffing and course support are secured in advance.
It’s important to note there are some fixed parameters when it comes to course capacity – meaning no additional people can safely fit in an area to park, run, finish, etc. Those are not negotiable, even if we sold out the venue capacity months in advance.
Moral of the story – if it’s a goal race for you, register ahead of time. Watch our social media updates and Web site, but know that once we get to that limited capacity status, we can’t just fit you in after registration closes because we like you (as much as we might want to!).
Please reach out with questions or share feedback, we enjoy hearing from you (not just when something goes awry) and we will continue to try out best to support you through the next year. Don’t forget to visit the Support Hub for seasonal content and resources available from experts and partners.
Happy holidays, and best wishes for a great 2025!
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