2024 - Austin Marathon Week Recap

thank YOU

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RAW Running
February 23, 2024

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Special Announcement

A little recap…

Wow, after taking a few days to decompress and finally having a short amount of time to write this - the only words we have are wow.

First of all, the shakeout run. That was insane. Over 1000 people showed up, packed Fleet Feet Seaholm, and got a run in. And we saw all kinds of people show up in their work clothes making the effort to being there even if it was a tight sprint to work after showing up. Thank you for that - the support was awesome.

We wouldn’t be here without so many people DM’ing us asking how they could help or volunteer during the weekend. By our count, more than 30 RAW folks showed up and helped in various capacities on Friday and Saturday at the expo.

Race day couldn’t have gone any better. William, Sean, and Jose put on a party for the ages - but if you know them, you also know they did a lot of planning. They don’t just show up on Sunday morning expecting things to happen. They spent dozens of hours coordinating road closures, ordering things, planning, recruiting volunteers, and so much more. Form ordering confetti cannons, coffee, breakfast tacos, sidewalk chalk, leaf blowers, and so much more - they made that cheer station happen. It was amazing.

The actual race has way too much to highlight but two performances caught my eye right off the bat.

Audrey Atkinson finished in 3:17 and in the top 20 overall women!!! Are you kidding me?! What a day! Are we shooting for sub 3 next year and top 5 Audrey?

Then, Mitch Penrod stepped up to the plate with $7,000 dollars on the line and delivered a 3:19 marathon securing all those donations. If you haven’t donated yet you have two options -

1) Donate directly to Michael J Fox Foundation - if you do, post your receipt and tag Mitch, RAW, and UARunning

2) *this is completely optional* - Venmo William Dyson your commitment by 4:00 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 25 - Venmo - https://venmo.com/u/William-Dyson-52 - in the message include "Mitch + your IG handle" - he will compile everything and make a donation through Dell who will MATCH the donation made to the Michael J Fox Foundation - if you don't feel comfortable doing this (which is completely okay) then please donate following option #1

Lastly, we would be remiss if we didn’t mention that Ben Duong set the world record in the half marathon while dribbling a basketball. He covered 13.1 miles in 1:21… good for 12th overall. Here’s a great article about it.

Finally, thanks to so many sponsors but especially Paul Tearson (Modern Wealth), Ansel and High Five Events, we had an out of control night at Mayfair. That after party was truly unbelievable and the best one we’ve ever done. We were able to host the whole Austin running community due to the space and we just had a blast.

RAW is really special. There’s so many great people that show up, care about one another, and run #HAF. We don’t do this for the money (news flash: everything we do is free), we aren’t influencers, we don’t have some long game planned to charge or make a buck or anything like that. We meet every Tuesday, at 7p, at Mean Eyed Cat and we run a hard workout so we can hopefully not get as old as fast and have a few beers afterwards. That’s it. That’s the shtick. And we have some really great partners like Under Armour and Mean Eyed Cat that support our vision. We did this interview for the live broadcast with Big Al this past weekend and it was a nice reminder of why RAW is special and how running can really change someone’s life and how we’re lucky to play a tiny part in that.

The interview with Alex begins at 3 hours, 25 minutes and 37 seconds INTO the stream (or 3:03:08 if youre using the clock to navigate the stream): here’s the link.

Ok, last thing —

A lot of RAW is made possible by Under Armour. Really. They support our crew. Go ahead and head to UA and use the code RAW2024 and buy something. It helps us and helps UA to know the value they are driving by backing us. Share the link with a friend, put it in your company Slack channel, post it anywhere, do whatever. It’s good for 40% off one time.

Links to photo albums (remember, if you use these photos you need to credit the people. If we are on the internet and see you using these photos without credit we will personally tag you in a story and call you out!)

Thanks again for everyone’s effort this past week!