I've been exploring these ideas for a couple of years now. The trail/ultra/off road racing scene has changed an awful lot in the last 15-20 years, and I think the changes bear calling out and talking about.
I have a number of different involvements in off road running.
I'm a participant in races.
I volunteer as a marshal/first aider/general tech dogsbody on a lot of races: some for Todmorden Harriers running club; some for Craggrunner.
I'm also interested in timing and tracking technology, and have ongoing prototype open source products in development.
I also used to be a committee member of Runfurther, which for those who don't know was a not-for-profit set up in 2015 to promote and support ultra distance running.
When I started to get involved in off road racing (fell & trail) in around 2008, most races were organised by individual running clubs. A few events like the Fellsman were run by the Scouting Association; lots of events were organised by the LDWA (and open to runners - the LDWA have always welcomed runners as part of their events); a few were organised by other clubs like the Achille Ratti.
Fast forward to 2026 and there are far more events taking place, especially at the longer distances. But almost all of them are organised by commercial operators, small and large. At one end of the scale you have the small race companies like Craggrunner, Trail Outlaws, Punk Panther etc (and my writing inevitably has a north of England bias, incidentally). At the other end of the spectrum is the corporate behemoth that is UTMB/Ironman Corp. In between you have some larger commercial companies like GB Ultras; Rat Race; and the late lamented Ourea. You also have some larger not-for-profit but quite slick events like The Spine Race; Saunders Lakeland; and The OMM.
What's interesting is that almost all of these still rely heavily on volunteer labour. More and more lately things like tracking, timing and first aid support are outsourced to professional specialists; and hardly anyone bakes buns for events any more. But the bulk of the work is being done by volunteers.
And honestly, that's just a bit weird.
Because for the most part, that means people are working effectively for free, while the RO collects the fees.
For sure, a lot of the time the RO barely breaks even and is just doing it for fun (and most of those smaller companies have just one or two people behind the business name). Very very few people are doing this because they're trying to get rich. Not zero, but very very few.
And volunteering on races can be lots of fun too. If it wasn't, I wouldn't do it.
But now that most races are commercial, but still run on volunteer labour, as a volunteer you're effectively working for free.
Most ROs offer race credit or similar in recompense. Rat Race for example (no shade on RR, they just happened to be very open about publishing their terms) cover your travel, and give you 150 quid in race credit or merch credit for an 8-10 hour shift. Even assuming you factor out your travel or don't have far to go, you're getting something not that much more than minimum wage. I honestly don't know where this fits into employment law, and I'm not sure I want to go there.
Spine are a bit less forthcoming, I guess because loads of people want to enter their races. So they offer travel, food, and the chance to be entered into a prize draw for a free entry. I honestly don't know if that includes their flagship events - I suspect not.
What would happen if ROs had to pay all the people who make the races possible? I think most would fold if I'm honest - I worked out that one race I sometimes work on required an absolute minimum of 15 volunteers for a ten hour day. Casual work at minimum wage would be about 100 quid each, which adds at the very least 1500 on the overheads of the event. Add on the costs of timing, medical cover etc which is increasingly expected or even required, and the overheads start to get pretty big when your entry numbers are around a couple of hundred. That "2 pounds per mile" reasonable entry fee soon gets eaten up.
Which means the crew rewards end up having to be intangible. Shared goals, community, the status and recognition of being part of the crew... the reasons are many, and it seems so far to be enough most of the time
But we can't call this a functioning business model, 'cos it really isn't.
2 or 3 years ago I was at the Outdoor Events Conference run by Ourea and OpenTracking, and Shane was talking about the risks of the activities that we run and the potential for liability issues. Increasingly risk is being pulled into the public eye and at the same time a growing number of less experienced people are taking part in a lot of these events. Event organisers are under increasing pressure to have more and more safety regulation in place: professional medical services; participant tracking etc.
All of these things bring a cost, and that's driving up the cost of events. The Fellsman introduced trackers a few years ago to enable them to drop the wildly unpopular night time grouping rule. Most of us were happy to pay a little extra for that. I'll talk on another occasion about how useful (or not) tracking is for safety on different kinds of events, but for now let's take it as read that it's a safety feature. The equipment itself isn't cheap - a Queclink 530 gps tracker costs about 50 (maybe 20-30 if you buy in bulk) quid, and if you have 200 participants that's ten grands worth of kit. Every tracker needs a multi-operator SIM card, so you're looking at a fixed monthly overhead there of maybe another 20-30 per unit. OpenTracking use a whole load of custom gear to allow them to handle big numbers, and that can't have been cheap. Then there is the cost of operating all this stuff - it's technically complex, requires skilled technical people to build and operate it, and they don't come cheap.
Timing is less dramatically costly but still an additional cost. Chip timing of the sort used by road races requires extremely costly equipment (those RFID readers and antennae are very expensive), but it's commoditised and doesn't end up costing the RO that much. For more complex use cases SportIdent is widely used, especially in fell races. While it does require some skill to use it, there are plenty of us around who know how. There are lots of phone based options, some using NFC or just a "Parkrun app" type of functionality, for free or low cost.
Professional medical services are increasingly common as ROs worry about potential liability. It takes a lot of pressure off volunteers for sure - not everyone is comfortable dealing with blood and injury; and it can be an overhead to make sure you have sufficient volunteers with the right training and willingness to deal with problems. But it's really not cheap, and it takes an opportunity away from your volunteers to develop and use first aid skills - and that's one of those intangible rewards that keeps them showing up to help you.
I don't have any particular conclusion to draw - this is partly a complaint that as a race volunteer I'm increasingly getting the rewarding jobs taken away, while I still work hard for little recompense. But it's also an observation of the events market as it stands now. Where it's going I'm not sure - if costs carry on growing they'll eventually hit the limit people are prepared to pay. Many people expect that there will eventually be legislation to force races to meet quite stringent standards.
If that happens, unless there's an exemption for club and charity events, a lot of the scene will simply disappear. The smaller ROs will be driven out of the market, and we'll all be entering the ballot for the UTMB-with-Smalltown-Harriers midweek fell race at 200 quid, no EOD.
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