Hey Anne, thanks for your review, and also kudos for taking the plunge into the world of club racing! I spoke to you briefly around number collection. The club scene can be quite intimidating, especially to women, as evidenced in our (extremely) poor field gender splits over the years- see for yourself via the 'our races' tab on the Wirral AC website, historic results linked on the Birkenhead Park 5 page. Absolutely shocking. We (Race director Ronan and I) decided to try and change that via a wider SM campaign in the build up (to attract people who were not necessarily aware of the race) and engage on Twitter with more people, including the local experts in getting people out running, our wonderful local parkrun team. We got a 40/60 gender split in registrations, which although way better than anything previously seen is still not that great and we want to do better next year. Clearly that takes additional work and understanding so any tips appreciated. Part of this will be seeing if we can up the race limit which depends on facilities. From my limited view (I was dishing out numbers with Ronan's daughter Emily) I didn't see many issues but I was quite busy in spells. 350 people came through in around 80 minutes, which although hectic at times was quite manageable with 4 tablets and 2 people plus Nifty expert around to handle any IT oddities (almost none). 600 hundred would be doable with 6 tablets and 3 people, it follows. Could the rest of the setup handle that number though? I think so but didn't see everything. Mementos. It's partly a question of time and organisational complexity, also cost as you mention. That said, I did float the idea of a race poster, which would be available at extra cost, but it seems a bit 'out there' as far as usual stuff goes. Dunno if people would pay for something designed by eg these talented New Brighton types: https://www.toucan-tango.com/ Thanks again! Al

Thanks for taking the time to post a review Brian. Glad the number collection was something you liked, our timing partner Nifty Entries has an excellent solution and hopefully it will become commonplace in future. It's really the key bottleneck to unlock before considering the following question: How many runners could the race handle? (on the current course and with the current facilities). We ask because the current race limit of 400 is based on.....nothing at all, other that 'pick a number which is way more than we'll ever get turning up'. So we may look to increase the race limit but only to the point the facilities can handle it. I was handing out numbers with Emily (It helps to have a sub-17 5k runner if you need people to run around handing out numbers :-) ) so didn't see if there was problems with facilities capacity. Certainly no reports of any issues but often that doesn't mean there were none. Thanks for coming along and supporting our club race, it is very much appreciated and hopefully people enjoyed the night and watching Jonny (isn't he fast!).

Thanks for the review! The number collection process is something we received a lot of feedback about last year and we wanted to make it much easier. Our entries partner Nifty Entries recently launched the tablet-based registration at Christleton and it seemed to work pretty well- numbers are allocated sequentially as people tap in, so no searching through lists or a pile of numbers required- just take the next number and hand it to the person who just tapped in- the marshal's tablets displayed a live list of names/numbers so they could call names immediately.