The No Refund / No Exchange Policy (And Why We Have It)
There will be some people that registered for the race that can’t make it. This happens in all races and something we account for when doing our planning.
And just as there will be people who ask for refunds or exchanges, there will be people a bit upset when we say no. But if we say no, the least we can do is offer you the reasons:
1. We don’t have any staff to deal with the dozens of such requests we will get. The race is organized by a non-profit running group that works on a 100% volunteer basis from the organizers; and
2. The reason we can keep the price of the race so low is because we factor in that there will be some no-shows. There will be injuries, weddings, inclement weather and other parts of life that affect our plans for races we may have signed up for months in advance. We oversubscribe the event to account for this.
So if we did exchanges/refunds we would have to first find more volunteers to handle the task, and then account for the refunds by raising the price of the event.
We hope you understand our desire to put on a top quality event while keeping the registration fees as low as we can, and maximizing the efforts of our volunteers toward race-related duties.
Update: This is why we limit the number of runners.
How Fast (Slow) Is the Race Course?
If you are wondering how your time will stack up to a 1/2 marathon road race (and wondering if you will finish under 3 hours) then you can use this rule of thumb: Add 15 minutes to your expected road race time to guesstimate your finishing time here.
The trails vary in their complexity, with the Leatherstocking likely adding 2 min/mile to your regular time. Other trails have a few wide flat stretches that can move you almost to road pace. Not many, mind you, but they exist.
The 15 minute rule is based not only on my years running these trails, but on a comparison last year of people who ran both P2P and the Westchester Half the following week.