Watch Your Inbox: Broad Street Bibs and Corral Assignments to Be Emailed Tomorrow

Plus: what your corral color actually means.

Just a quick note from the Broad Street Run folks that corral assignments and race-bib numbers are due to be sent via e-mail tomorrow, April 27th. If you don’t see the email, you might want to check your spam box. When the race notified runners that they were selected from the lottery back in February, more than a few of us had to fish those notifications out of our spam folder.

For anyone who’s never run Broad Street before—or a race in general, for that matter—organizers try to group runners according to the finish time you indicated on your registration form. The hope is that by corralling runners (hence, you know, corrals) and using a waved start procedure—meaning, they build in a few minutes of padding between when each corral crosses the start line—runners will be spaced out at well-paced intervals with few traffic jams along the course. It doesn’t always work, but it helps.

When you get to the starting line on May 5th, just look for your corral color and go stand with your people. Of course, no one really polices this procedure to make sure everybody is where they’re supposed to be, except for possibly the elite group and the first competitive group at the front. So if, say, you wanted to run with your friends in a corral further back, I’m 99 percent confident that no one would actually stop you. But you didn’t hear that from me.