Never give up

In the four years that I’ve been a race director, I’ve designed almost 20 race shirts. You’d think this would get easier, but it actually gets harder.

When a race is in its first year, the shirt is easy to design because the newly revealed race logo is the highlight. Then it gets harder. In the past, we’ve moved the logos around to different locations of the shirt to make a new design. Then last year we even redesigned the race logo and printed it with glow-in-the-dark ink to keep it fresh. This year we decided to have more fun. It’s been a challenge to find something that’s not already done on a race shirt but we believe that we have.

This year’s technical shirt design was inspired by a woman I saw in a Zumba class a few years ago. She ripped her shirt into pieces and it looked very pirate-like. In the back of my mind, I always wanted to figure out a way to make a race shirt look ripped like a pirate. The problem is, we cannot afford to manufacture our own shirts and technical material doesn’t fray like a cotton shirt. This means, we’d have to achieve this ripped without actually ripping the shirts, so we turned to ink.

The technical shirt design has been in development for months. We’ve been struggling to make the ripped look work. We almost gave-up on the idea of the pirate-rip design last week. Then, last Saturday night, a couple of my running friends were over helping me count race inventory and we had a breakthrough. I showed the girls multiple versions of the shirt design. I explained our struggles with the shirts and told them that if we didn’t come up with a solution this week we planned to scrap the idea and start over in a completely new direction.

They agreed the shirt design had potential but the rip wasn’t quite realistic enough. Then one of the girls made a suggestion which was exactly what the design needed: the rips needed shadows. We contacted the graphic designer and Janet worked the rest of the weekend adding shadows to the design. By Monday morning it was perfect!

Even with the design concept complete, we weren’t done yet. We still needed to print the shirt because designs on a computer often won’t look the same printed. To our relief, the pirate rips looked fantastic printed.

To think, we almost gave up on this amazing idea. Coincidentally, my mom sent me this funny cartoon a couple weeks ago:

I learned a few important lessons this week. My friends are brilliant, my graphic designer is second to none and I should listen to my mom when she says “never give up.”