The final roster had 187 runners on it.
PPTC's fall Marathon Training Group was supposed to start the next Tuesday. We would meet at Grand Army Plaza at 6 a.m., warm up down to Lakeside, start the speed work around 6:10, and finish with a short strength session.
The visible part was simple. Show up Tuesday morning and run.
The setup was not.
We had a Google Form, a response sheet, a cleaned roster, an email group, and TrainingPeaks. People needed to use the same email address for the form and their TrainingPeaks account. Anyone who already had a coach attached might need to remove that connection before we could load the club plan.
The free account was enough. Nobody needed to pay for premium just to see the workouts.
My part was connecting the runners to the PPTC coaching account and importing the plans. The first roster arrived with a warning that some fat-finger mistakes had already been cleaned up. I planned to wait another day for late changes, then get everybody linked by the end of the week or early the next one.
Questions started immediately.
A runner who would miss the first Tuesday wanted to know whether that broke the plan. It did not. Tuesday was the official meeting day, but every workout would also be available digitally. People could train while they were away and jump into the group when they got back.
The volunteer coaches met at the Double Windsor to go over the season. The response spreadsheet kept growing. A final email address needed fixing. More runners needed help finding the right account.
The start note made the scale explicit: 187 people had signed up, and this was a strictly volunteer outfit. Please be patient.
That morning was the Fourth of July. The final roster landed the night before. By the afternoon I was back in it.
“awesome doing the work on this now!”