"Teams" of two and field sizes of fourteen aren't enough to keep a stand-alone road 10K afloat, as coasting on the merits of a musty reputation is never an endless ride
Re: race numbers being down: I think the pandemic's effect is more from people getting out of the habit than continuing concern about large gatherings. (The coffee shops and brew pubs of Boulder are likely thriving.) Note that big marathons and even half marathons are close to pre-pandemic numbers. Putting those larger races' infrastructure over a shorter race makes the latter more of a hassle than they're usually worth. A lot more people may have finally realized that spending a lot of money and a good part of a weekend day or holiday just isn't worth it for a 10K or 10-miler.
Related, it could be that the sort of runners who used to be attracted by the "I did it" bragging rights from these events realized during the pandemic they can use their watch to do their own thing, post about it on social, and get the same "attaboy/girl" reactions. The onus is on running events to justify the time and money necessary to participate in them.
"I hate virtually all of you with a thrumming and throbbing (but non-sexual) passion so intense it makes my nails grow longer by the week and foul brown things topple out of my rear end just about daily."
This is precisely why I have loved reading your "banal output" for the better part of the last two decades.
Your love for mankind is obviously too gr, eat for you to feel comfortable acknowledging it so you simply gush in the other direction. I think it's going to be some time until we're back to a time when people just went to things where there'll be other people. When my wife's friends decide to have one of their little get togethers now, maybe 6-8 of them, there's a whole round of phone calls, discussions about covid tests, who's not coming because they're afraid of someone else who is. On a larger scale, it seems to me that most "big" crowds are smaller than they were three years or more ago. But also,.the size of road race fields was not going to keep getting bigger each year. Eventually numbers would max out and drop. And I think too that you're going to see significant numbers of runners who stopped going to road races and found they don't miss them, that they can time themselves over a measured route, not spend $40 to do it in a formal race and buy a t-shirt they like better than the race one for a lot less money than the race entry fee.
Re: race numbers being down: I think the pandemic's effect is more from people getting out of the habit than continuing concern about large gatherings. (The coffee shops and brew pubs of Boulder are likely thriving.) Note that big marathons and even half marathons are close to pre-pandemic numbers. Putting those larger races' infrastructure over a shorter race makes the latter more of a hassle than they're usually worth. A lot more people may have finally realized that spending a lot of money and a good part of a weekend day or holiday just isn't worth it for a 10K or 10-miler.
Related, it could be that the sort of runners who used to be attracted by the "I did it" bragging rights from these events realized during the pandemic they can use their watch to do their own thing, post about it on social, and get the same "attaboy/girl" reactions. The onus is on running events to justify the time and money necessary to participate in them.
"I hate virtually all of you with a thrumming and throbbing (but non-sexual) passion so intense it makes my nails grow longer by the week and foul brown things topple out of my rear end just about daily."
This is precisely why I have loved reading your "banal output" for the better part of the last two decades.
Your love for mankind is obviously too gr, eat for you to feel comfortable acknowledging it so you simply gush in the other direction. I think it's going to be some time until we're back to a time when people just went to things where there'll be other people. When my wife's friends decide to have one of their little get togethers now, maybe 6-8 of them, there's a whole round of phone calls, discussions about covid tests, who's not coming because they're afraid of someone else who is. On a larger scale, it seems to me that most "big" crowds are smaller than they were three years or more ago. But also,.the size of road race fields was not going to keep getting bigger each year. Eventually numbers would max out and drop. And I think too that you're going to see significant numbers of runners who stopped going to road races and found they don't miss them, that they can time themselves over a measured route, not spend $40 to do it in a formal race and buy a t-shirt they like better than the race one for a lot less money than the race entry fee.