Ep. 4 How do you make your trail race awesome? With Race Director Myke Labelle

Race Director Myke Labelle going through a pre-race briefing. From Instagram

Create a tough course and memorable trail running event for all that take the start line. That’s what Myke Labelle manages to do, year in and year out. He’s a race director extraordinaire! How does he create those memorable events?

Myke directs the Vancouver Island Trail Series and the Finlayson Arm (or Finny) Races. With registration opening today for the series (Monday, February 14, 2022), Myke was kind enough to join me and chat about the race. I went longer than I’m aiming to, and we certainly could have kept going! But I’m trying to keep to a style idea here so my apologies for going slightly long.

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The most important thing (to me) is greeting every finisher. It is vitally important that I spend that 5, 10, 15 seconds with someone when they cross the finish line, because they’ve just had whatever expereince that they may have had, but they’ve also take the time out of their weekend, out of their lives to train for your event, and it’s important for me to recognize that. - Myke Labelle

Myke is a wonderful guy and is out to make his event as amazing for everyone as humanly possible. This race is a favourite of mine and really feels like a unique event to take part in. I can’t recommend it enough.

Click to read more about coaching services from Myke, as well as the Finlayson Arm races and the Vancouver Island Trail Series!

I was also excited to take some questions from Twitter for the first time:

Charlie Manx @Manx_Charlie

@ultrapostie Excited to hear this one. Insight into how to make a ‘good’ race. I find that races have a bit of the personality of the RD in them. Route choice / hills to include / number of times crossing the SAME river 🥶. Pre race briefing style etc.

Lauren @laurenjjwilson

@ultrapostie What makes them set the distances they do? There’s an acceptance of ‘50’ as a nice round number but maybe the route suits an epic 44km or 62km. Im curious if the distance is dictated by wanted to standardise the event in some way…

Brian Vatne @brvatne

@ultrapostie Yeah I'll check it out. Is it Myke you're talking to? Ask him if he'll consider a Finny 100 miler in 2023 😍

Thanks to all of you that submitted and I apologize if I couldn’t get to yours. Time goes so fast!

As mentioned in the introduction of the podcast, I’m still taking submissions for “What does trail running mean to you?” Check that post out after if you haven’t submitted it already, and let me know!

My favourite race photo! Sheena had to work that day so she took the bus for 90 minutes afterwords, just to meet me at the finish. It was so great to see her :) From 2019

Finally, Human powered is a documentary by Matt Cecill about the 2018 version of the Finlayson Arm races and is a super fun watch. Whether you are running the race or not, the video is a great use of your time. Myke and I flew through our conversation so fast, we didn’t even get to talk about it! You’ll be ready for a run after you watch :)

If you enjoy the podcast, I would really appreciate it if you could like, share, subscribe, or comment! I’m trying to make this the best trail running podcast it can be and I certainly appreciate your time. Thank you all and happy trails :)