As I was completing some of my arrangements for the Tour de Georgia trip, I was thinking about how much work went into the logistics of course marshal placement for the first Georgia race. Threshold Sports was hired to do the logistics for that first race, so we had one of our really sharp guys, Dave “Lumpy” Williams, down there for months, planning the route. Then, around January or February, I headed out to Georgia, along with Chris Spaeth from Threshold, and we all spent about a week driving the entire 600 mile route, to plan course marshal placements.

I sat in the back seat of a mini-van with a clipboard and a pad of yellow legal paper, and wrote the location and names of every street and road intersection, freeway or highway entrances and exits, school, shopping center: anywhere that there was traffic entering the race route. And noted our estimate of how many course marshals would be needed at each location to keep the riders and the public safe. Think about it, every spot where a vehicle might enter the course while the race was in progress, I wrote the mileage, street/road names and any hazards (blind curves, potholes, railroad crossings, etc.) Jeeze - writing fast and furiously 600 miles worth...

I’m not kidding - I hardly had a chance to even look up, as Lumpy or Chris would call out street/road names, and I would write as fast as I could as we drove along. I had pages and pages and pages - dozens of pages - of course marshal posts. When I returned to work the race in April, supervising the course marshals (along with Chris and another guy), I hardly recognized many of the routes because all I had seen for seven days and 600 miles of beautiful Georgia country was that damn yellow pad of paper and the back of the driver’s head!

We had local volunteers for each city, and then we had a crew of 50 volunteer traveling course marshals. We had five Dodge Sprints with ten of the traveling course marshals riding in each van. We had to plan how to move these 50 people, picking them up instantly as the race went by, and jumping them around the racing on the course to get them ahead of the race and placed at their posts all the distance of each stage. Van numbers 1 through 5 went in sequential order along the route each stage. The drivers were heroes, who drove like Hell along back roads and freeways to get their course marshals up ahead of the race in time.

It was a tremendous first-time challenge in Georgia, and our traveling course marshals were real troopers, who put up with all kinds of crap from all kinds of sources. They all hung in and did an incredible job on that first Tour de Georgia. There was so much pressure on all of us to not have any screw-ups, especially with Lance riding in the race. I think we set the blueprint for excellence in how do the course marshal logistics in Georgia that first year. I went back to TdG as Media last year, and I think that is when I fully realized what a huge job that started from the back of a minivan.