Quad starts Saturday

By Helen Davis
Cibola County Bureau

GRANTS — Race day is approaching.

The 25th annual Mount Taylor Quadrathlon race committee winds up its last weekly meeting tonight and starts oiling the gears of the great Quad machine.

Quad official Terry Fletcher said the organizing committee never knows who will show up to help or how many racers will head up the hill until the race is nearly under way. The official count of race entries was 308 on Saturday, but distant entries are still coming in. Local racers have until 5 p.m. today to register.

Fletcher said he bought 300 volunteer hats and shrugged. By 6:30 a.m. race day, volunteers will fill the hats and scatter to staff stations on the mountain, at transition points and at the hub of activities in the Grants Convention Center. But whether the committee bought enough hats is still a question. Last minute volunteers can show up at the Convention Center anytime before 6:30 a.m. on Saturday.

Some volunteer clubs signed on early, said Fletcher. The Future Foundations Bicycle Society will be on hand. Marine Corps volunteers are coming from Albuquerque to help. The Grants Rodeo Club has the “half-way” position.

Boy Scouts from Grants will work the bike/run transition point, the first stop where racers change from one sport to another The Snow Mobile Club will cover the ski/snow shoe change point.

Fletcher said that organizational volunteers are all signed on and experienced in the more complex tasks involved in supervising a transition point, coordinating safety or emergency services, transporting racer equipment up the mountain and many of the other invisible but huge tasks the make up the underpinnings of the event.

The big excitement before the race is the equipment check-in and registration on Friday. Registration begins at 2 p.m. at the Convention Center in the Cibola County Building on High Street in downtown Grants and runs “till the last one is in,” Fletcher said.

The madhouse of excited people, piles of equipment and lost mittens can run as late as 11 p.m., depending on road conditions and other vagaries of travel.

Information: Last weekly volunteer meeting — 5:30 p.m. today at 100 Iron Street, Grants. Call (505) 287-4802.