Sold out: Spa Running Festival is full 2 months before the event
Two months before the largest running event in Hot Springs kicks off its 42nd year, the Spa Running Festival has sold out of entries.
Started as just a 10-kilometer race in 1981, the annual event, which will be held on Nov. 11, was rebranded as the Spa Running Festival in 2015 with the introduction of the Summit2Summit half marathon, said event organizer Cindy Baswell.
“It was the original event that started the race, and then the next year, it became a part of the (Arkansas) Grand Prix series,” she said, referencing the yearlong series of races administered by the Arkansas chapter of the Road Runners Club of America. “So it’s been a part of the Grand Prix series for 41 years.
“I can’t really tell you — I don’t have good records to know — when the 5K was added, but it’s been around, I know, for about 30, 35 years, at least. Then in 2015 is when we did the Summit2Summit, and we started with just 250 entries that year. And then gradually, we’ve increased it, and we have it up to 550 is our cap on the half this year.”
The 5K and 10K races are capped at 600 entries each, and while the festival usually sells out in advance, this is the earliest it has ever sold out.
“I guess the last three years, it just gets earlier and earlier,” Baswell said. “Last year, it was about a month before the race that it sold out, and this year, it’s two months — exactly two months before the race. So I guess that speaks well for our race and people wanting to come to it, and word is out about our race, I guess just among the runners talking about it.”
While Baswell admitted she is a bit biased about the quality of the race, the reviews she gets each year after the race are also positive.
“We do a survey after the race, and I read all of the emails,” she said. “When runners give you great reviews about your race and
runners (are) talking about it, I mean, that’s what you go by. People come to the Spa Running Festival. They think it’s a great course; it’s a beautiful time of the year. They love coming to Hot Springs; it’s a great weekend getaway.
“All of those things, I think, factor in that our race is becoming, I think, one of the premier races in the state of Arkansas, if you take away the Little Rock Marathon. We’re not comparing apples to apples with them, but as far as just a race our size it’s becoming one of the number one races in Arkansas to do.”
Runners from 34 states will be competing in this year’s running festival, Baswell said.
“We have them coming from New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maine from the east, and then we go over to Washington state and then down to California and over to Florida and in everything in between,” she said.
“So that’s great because those folks, number one, they’re gonna get to experience our race, but they get to experience Hot Springs because I would hope those people would stay Friday, Saturday night, just to get to enjoy — as far as they’re traveling — that they stay that extra day and get to enjoy the Hot Springs area. So it’s great for our city and the economy that it brings to our city that weekend.”
One thing that is a bit unusual is seeing people from hundreds of miles away coming to run the shorter races.
“We’re getting people traveling distances for the 5K and 10K,” Baswell said. “It just really surprises me. I think there’s a group coming from Minnesota that’s registered for the 5K. It must be a family doing something together, but the majority of the people traveling are the ones coming for the half marathon.”
With the race selling out so early, Baswell said she has been inundated with email requests from people to be put on a waiting list for possible entry for a race.
“I’ve already started the waiting lists for each of the three events, and I’m getting the emails,” she said. “They’re saying, ‘Oh my goodness, I went and tried to register, and I can’t; it’s full. Can you add me to the waiting list?’ When I do that, I have people that notify me, ‘Hey, I’ve had an injury, or I know I’m not going to be able to come,’ and I work with those people and basically refund their registration so I can add those people from the waitlist.
“That’s the only way I can do it because we only have a certain number of bibs, so I just can’t go out and randomly add more numbers because you’ve got to have the proper bib numbers to correspond with their registration,” Baswell said.
The annual expo, a combined event with the fifth annual Gudrun — Northwoods Mountain Bike Festival, will be held Nov. 10 from noon to 7 p.m., and there will once again be food and beverages for runners after the race.
“We’re gonna have the food court area, like we did last year between the burgers and the pizza and the hot soup and the beer tent and all of that,” Baswell said.
There have been calls every year for expansion, but logistics and the concern that too much expansion would hurt the experience have slowed organizers from adding to the race too quickly. Baswell recalled a half marathon in Conway several years ago that kept expanding the number of entries to the point it crowded the finish line and hurt the overall experience.
“We always ask ourselves, ‘How many more participants can we add and it not take away from the value and the race experience that the runner receives?’” she said. “Because you can get too big.
“We don’t want to get into that. And the thing about it is that we have three races that’s coming in all at one time. Because the way we’ve staggered the start times with the half at 7 o’clock, the 10K at 7:45 (a.m.) and the 5K at 8 o’clock, all of your winners are coming in within five minutes of each other. They come in from like about 8:20 to 8:30 (a.m.), the 10K, 5K in half, and then the others follow. It’s just there’s so many runners that can come in down Convention and be over in our food court area. So that’s really the issue.”