Obstacle-run craze reaches CNY

OWASCO — Three years in, the Finger Lakes Mud Run, described as a “challenging, military-style trail run,” continues to see a surge in interest.

Registration is expected to exceed 2,000 people for the Sept. 27 event held at Everest Park in Owasco, says Robb Bonilla, director of operations for the event. That’s up 33 percent from last year’s 1,500 participants, and more than double the 900 who partook in the run in its inaugural year in 2012.

The Finger Lakes Mud Run includes between 15 and 24 obstacles and between 40 and 100 elevation changes greater than 20 feet to challenge participants. Runners have a choice between a 5K or 14K course. A third course, the Mini Muddy, allows for children ages 6 to 12 years old to partake in the mud activities. Registration prices range from $15 to $85, depending on date of registration and event.

Eighty percent of the course is new this year, expanded from the park’s 160 acres to now encompass 750 acres, says Bonilla. The additional acreage comes from adjoining property owners allowing their land to be used in the event.

But the key to the whole thing is the obstacles.

“We don’t just rely on the natural terrain,” says Bonilla. “Our goal is to create obstacles that no one else has.”

Bonilla, who works full time as a design engineer at Pall Corp. in Cortland, draws the concepts for the obstacles and hands them over to the construction-services team to build. He relies on feedback from the construction team leader, Mike Lowe, who is also an avid obstacle-run contestant, to see if the obstacles will work logistically on the course.

Besides a construction-services team, Bonilla works with 11 other teams and more than 200 volunteers in total to organize the mud run

“We strive to be as organized as possible. We make a significant investment to do it the right way,” says Bonilla. It’s why he has a 200-plus page handbook on how to operate the event. “Customer experience has been the first priority since day one.”

Buy local
The concept of the mud run came about from a committee that met in late 2011 to rethink Everest Park’s potential uses. They came up with ideas ranging from yoga to hot air balloons to a mud run. Once the mud run idea stuck, Bonilla researched and presented a proposal for a three-year obstacle run event to the board of Champions For Life, an Auburn nonprofit that operates Everest Park and is the fiscal sponsor for the event. The nonprofit employs Bonilla as director, who is the only paid staff member for the event.

 All of the net proceeds go towards extending the mission of Everest Park, which offers a retreat for families with children who are experiencing life-altering health problems. Last year, $19,000 in event proceeds were donated to the park.

The Finger Lakes Mud Run has become the biggest fundraiser, not just for Champions For Life, but also for the area, says Bonilla. Combining that with the continued increase in participation, he anticipates the three-year plan being extended.

More than 55 percent of people travel to the event from outside Cayuga County, and at press time, 6 percent of participants registered are from outside of the state.

“We actively try to reach as many people as possible,” says Bonilla. “We never thought of it as an Auburn thing. It’s a regional event.”

Not only will those who travel to the event “bring dollars to Cayuga County” with the need for hotels, gas, and food, organizers make a strong effort to use local vendors for products and services needed to stage the mud run.

“We buy local as much as we can,” says Bonilla. “We do everything we can to keep the dollars local.” This includes buying construction materials locally, to having local printers produce merchandise, to hiring Auburn–based Crème della Crème Copywriting and Communication, LLC, to handle the public relations and marketing of the event.

Bonilla says the budget to produce the Finger Lakes Mud Run exceeds $100,000.

Mud Opportunities
Beyond Cayuga County, several obstacle runs have popped up across Central New York.

In April, the Southern Tier AIDS Program (STAP) in Binghamton hosted the Mud Gauntlet, Broome County’s first hardcore outdoor-obstacle course event. More than 400 people participated in the event and more than $43,000 was raised for STAP, says Mary Kaminsky, director of development for STAP. Kaminsky says the organization plans on holding the Mud Gauntlet again next year.

Then in May, Johnson City’s Family Enrichment Network held the Mud Mountain Rock & Run, 5K at the Broome-Tioga Sports Center in Lisle. The Canton Pee Wee Association held a mud-run fundraising event in July with an obstacle-course race for children and adults set up on private property in Canton.

On Sept. 7, the Binghamton Mud Gauntlet course will be used again for a “zombie run” to raise funds for Team HopeFull, a nonprofit organization that donates money to various organizations that help those afflicted with Prader-Willi Syndrome, the most common known genetic cause of life-threatening obesity in children.

On Oct. 11, the Syracuse Sports Association will hold its third Run of the Dead 5K obstacle run event.

Despite many communities launching their own independent obstacle races, the top organizers, like Tough Mudder, Warrior Dash, and Dirty Girl, together hold 70 percent of the industry’s market share.

Tough Mudder, which has about a 24 percent market share, holds an event at the Tall Pines ATV Park in Andover (in Alleghany County). Up to 15,000 people attend an average Tough Mudder event and the company estimates that the local economic activity per event increases by $2 million to $10 million, according to the website.

Nearly 3.4 million people participated in an obstacle-course race in 2013, and the number of participants is expected to exceed 4 million in 2014, according to the news report, “Obstacle Race World: The State of the Mud Run Business.” The report, the first on the obstacle-race industry, also found that obstacle runs generated revenue of $290.1 million from registrations in 2013, and are on pace to produce nearly $362 in registration revenue this year.

Standard road running races are one-dimensional, says Bonilla. A mud run, he says, is an intimate, unique experience where you don’t just “go up and down, but also over and under and through” while helping someone you don’t know over an obstacle.

Contact Collins at ncollins@cnybj.com