Race directors are empire builders—at least the best ones are. They reach for the stars, and their gaze frequently—maybe even usually—exceeds their grasp.

As a result, many share one very big shortcoming. They are very good at recognizing in their minds' eyes grand plans that ought to be executed, and can be executed. This is fine. If you are one of these people, good for you. It's a great gift to have. Your toe stubber is this: Just because a grand design can and ought be constructed, you assume it must be constructed, and that the responsibility for doing so is yours and yours alone.

I'll give you one guess how it is I know this :-)

What you have is vision. What you don't have is restraint. You can see, when you squint a certain way, what your intended race will look like. The winner of your race will sprint down the finish chute blowing kisses to a crowd lining the lane as if it was Alii Drive. The announcer sits perched fifteen feet above the crowd in a sort of crows nest that is built into the finish structure. He reaches down to grab something handed him by a minion on tip-toes—a slip of paper with the latest update of the women's race, still fifteen minutes away from the finish.

All this requires a superstructure and a scaffolding, and since it must be built right, you must build it. As well as the rest of the surrounding start/finish. And the sound system. And the barricades.

Furthermore, you must also construct the swim start. And you must buy precisely the swim buoys you see in your dreams, when you envision the lead pack round the final turn in the water.

Likewise, since everything must be first-cabin, you'll construct your own bike racks, because you've been unhappy with every bike race system you've ever used as a competitor.

About the only thing you aren't going to personally construct or have constructed is the bank of Port-o-potties. Those you'll farm out.

You'll tell yourself the fiction that this is all okay, because you'll rent all this stuff to other race directors. Except you'll discover that they've done the same thing, and will want to rent their stuff to you.

Right about this time you realize you've spent a lot of time working on stuff that is not part of your true mission. Your magic is in putting on a race, or working with community fathers, or organizing volunteers, or getting sponsors, or whatever it is you do well. It's probably not building a portable city.

Therefore, best to rent and borrow, only sparingly building something from scratch. Building it yourself, or having it built custom, is expensive and time consuming. Plus, you'll probably find you've built it in a way you'll regret a year or two later, and you'll find it difficult to store and transport all of this stuff between races.

Here's a list of some of the stuff I'm talking about:

Often, the poor slob who's built all this stuff himself is so rabid to rent it, he'll rent himself as well. I've found that the guy who owns the bike racks will not only rent them to you, he'll come out, set them up, tear them down, and transport them both ways. I know a guy who carries racks for well over a thousand bikes in the back of his old, beat up, mini pick-up truck. It can actually be a nice, simple gig for those who like to spend their weekends away from the wife.

My scaffolding guy was also my sound system guy, and he'd put all this up, tear it down, haul it, store it, all done. My only problem was making sure I booked him early enough, before others did. He was in demand.

Barricades and cones are the property of every city and county public works department. Beg and borrow what you can. These are expensive and you don't want to rent or buy them. Ye have not because ye ask not. You'd be surprised how willing certain government agencies are in letting you just borrow this stuff from them. Just ask. Many will say no. Keep asking around. Several will say yes.

Swim buoys are a bit tough to get your hands on some times. City or county lifeguard departments, parks and rec departments. Get orange. Yellow is a good color, you'd think. Orange is much, much more visible. You don't realize this until you buy the yellow ones and find out for yourself, as I did.

Big inflatables have to be filled up, and you'll carry your air compressor out there, or your bottles of compressed air, and then you'll realize it isn't air pressure you need, but air volume. A compressor delivers a lot of PSI. What you need is CFM (cubic feet per minute). You don't need an air compressor, you need a hand-held hair dryer. Or, for $50 you can buy what amounts to a hair dryer that doesn't heat the air. This will fill up your buoys much faster than a compressor, and is much, much easier to transport and use.

Or how about this. Save money and buy smaller buoys with hooks on their tops, and then have a party rental company deliver a bunch of helium-filled balloon strings to tie to the the rings on top of the buoys. These work even better than really big, and really expensive buoys. And have another big balloon string for your swim finish line.

Speaking of party rental companies, this is where you get your big tents, and tables and chairs (like for registration). However, again, chum the waters of cities and counties. You'll usually get much of what you want.

USA Triathlon has a new booklet that gives you a lot of options for all this stuff. And, they are getting better at actually being helpful to RDs by directing them toward those who provide goods and services. Use their knowledge. Perhaps we here on Slowtwitch will try to make things a bit easier and create a clearinghouse for things like this ourselves.