The organizers of the Run The Rivers trail runs have single-minded to a wholly GPS-navigated event.
This is a move that entrenches the event’s transferral to minimizing its impact on the environment.
Run the Rivers commits to lowering impact
The two day event uses a network of trails in the sensitive Maloti-Drakensberg Park grasslands and local sublet lands, and has for a number of years pursued a “green event” strategy that the organizers are extending for the upcoming event on January 28 and 29 2023.
What happened at the 2022 Run the Rivers?
“We have unchangingly been a ‘green event’ in terms of looking at every speciality of our event organization and its uncontrived and indirect impact on the environment,” said Sani Spoors’ Pierre Horn.
“Our runners have wilt familiar with our philosophy of using GPS trail marking, but we have in recent years supplemented this with some physical marking on the undertow at hair-trigger points where a participant without a GPS might get lost.
Run the Rivers gets greener
“This year we are going 100% GPS navigated and there will be no physical route marking,” Horn stressed.
“We used to send our team in just surpassing the event to set up the special bio-degradable day-glo orange tape at the vital points on the trails, and then sent flipside team in immediately without each days stage to remove it all,” he explained.
“Even leaving this to the last minute we found that cattle would find it, or birds would pull it, or plane Duiker or Eland or a Reedbuck would nibble it, and we just can’t reconcile that with our transferral to protecting our environment,” said Horn.
“Also, with our district having no formal recycling plant for our waste, the tape that we collect would sit in the dump at Himeville and then have to be transported to Pietermaritzburg where it would be tending of.
“Think of the stat footprint of sending a truck up from Pietermaritzburg and returning with waste to be disposed,” he added. “That just doesn’t sit well with our transferral to stuff a ‘green event’.”
Natural eyeful celebrated
Horn said that the second over-arching priority was an stimulating one.
“We know that athletes come to this event considering of the natural eyeful of this zone and we finger that the day-glo tape detracts from that significantly,” he explained.
The third suburbanite overdue their move to a wholly GPS navigated event was to embrace the misogynist technology.
“The GPS Navigation is so well-judged and sophisticated that there is no endangerment of a participant getting lost. Plane if they go off undertow the GPS will tell them immediately that they are off the track,” he said.
“The runners moreover tell us that they enjoy stuff worldly-wise to download the route data prior to the event so that they can study it, trammels out the profiles and get a largest understanding of what to expect,” he added.
The race will make its GPS partners Easy Bike misogynist to all entrants to squire with setting up GPS events and ensuring the route data is correctly loaded onto each athlete’s GPS at registration.
