Our final triathlon of 2026 was the T-Rex Tri, a sprint triathlon or duathlon at Island Lake State Recreation Area in Brighton. The RF Events crew continued last year’s tribute to the Flintstones, and Zero Waste Rex made an appearance at our station, too. On a perfect evening the athletes went at it extra hard, and we had two sprint finishers under an hour. Guess they ran like a dino was chasing them!
He’s just waiting for someone to trip, I think.
The main station went in its usual spot near the volunteer tent, with table added on the opposite end to collect waste from people approaching from behind. This worked better than a side table. Satellite stations went across from the Playa Bowls tent and across from the water stop, hiding the trash cans under the tables. Two more trash cans in the race area were relocated to under the main station. We also put two All Waste boxes in transition, and one at the finish line.
Left to right: Zero Waste Rex, Linda, Abby, Bridget.
Main waste captured was finish line water and Gatorade bottles, cups and jugs from water stops, cardboard, and plastic smoothie bowls, with several bags of waxed cups from the water stops. Compostables were way down from last year, with no pizza boxes and uneaten pizza, with recycling and landfill about the same.
Challenges for this event are the quick onset of darkness, which means the second water stop bags are sorted post-event, and the plastic fruit bowls, which needed to be washed out and dried before they could be recycled. Compostable bowls and spoons would work much better, which I will suggest for next time.
Our supporting cast of Linda, Bridget, and Abby gave me enough bandwidth to carefully sweep transition at takedown, which took a while due to the amount of scrap tags, paper clips, and other small things not picked up by the athletes. I may have to consider more active measures – more trash buckets in the rows themselves, perhaps? – to cut down on this stuff.
We put up reminders for people to clean their stations. Not so successful this time.
Next up is Run Woodstock in September. Until then, peace out!
P.S. If you’re wondering, Thomas won.
Happy Planet Running 