It was only natural that registration for the Banner-University Medicine El Tour de Tucson would be delayed by the coronavirus pandemic.
El Tour CEO Charlene Grabowski wanted to make sure that Southern Arizona’s largest participatory sporting event followed the advice and guidelines set out by experts from their title sponsor at Banner, the city, county and state, as well as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She said they wanted “to be socially responsible.”
Registration for the 38th edition of the race opened up Monday, nearly a month later than usual, and it was worth the wait.
Cyclists were greeted by a brand refresh — a newly designed website, registration tool and logo. It’s yet another project Grabowski has taken on in her first year as El Tour’s CEO.
“This is the most rewarding job I’ve ever had and it’s also the hardest,” she said. “We’re a startup with heritage and you don’t want to break that heritage. You look at everything and think really big on what-ifs scenarios. What if I change the logo and nothing else? Then, it’s nothing but the cover. We dug deep. The community is very supportive and I have a small team with deep expertise that brings it.
“If I look back now, I might say, ‘Holy cow! Look what we did.’ I might have had some trepidation at first, but we had to go big. We had a great vision, a great strategy and a plan in place. We picked great partners and it all came together.”
The new website is easier to navigate, with a registration sign-up button for the Nov. 21 race front and center.
The goals were to make the site easy to access, find information in a simple way and to make registration more intuitive.
Charlene Grabowski
“If you don’t make the front page more interesting, desirable and easy to get to registration, you miss,” Grabowski said. “We spent a lot of time up front to really know what we were solving for — and in testing and development. The front-end work was the most important.”
Grabowski thinks they hit the mark. El Tour had 117 sign-ups on the first day of registration in 2018.
On Monday alone, it had 131. By mid-week, there were at least 250 cyclists registered.
A rite of fall for decades, El Tour brings together thousands of riders to take part in a variety of different distances. The three main rides this year are 100, 57 and 28 miles. There are also “fun rides” at 10, 5 and 1 miles.
This year’s route will go south instead of north, with more details set to be unveiled later this year.
Grabowski said there were plenty of things to consider, including safety, showing off the beauty of Tucson and cost.
“First, you get out the big map,” Grabowski laughed. “Actually, we have an amazing guy, Tim Escobedo, who is fantastic with cycling and routes in Tucson. We had a request to go south, so we put him in that direction. Then we figure out things like, ‘Will there be road construction? Do the neighbors want it? Is it going on Native American land, and can we go there?’ We are on version 5 of this. It has to satisfy all the criteria.”
Once the plan is set they meet with various groups from city, county and state to have conversations and debates about different scenarios.
Grabowski is educating herself and talking to various groups to stay on top of things.
El Tour de Tucson participants carry their bikes through Sabino Creek during November’s race.
This week, she talked to USA Cycling and participated in a webinar with sports physicians advising on what it’s going to look like when we get back to our regular lives.
Part of this includes a new line item in the budget for masks.
In addition, Grabowski has signed up for the 28-mile ride. She isn’t quite sure how she will ride and attend to her other responsibilities on the day of the event. For now, she is taking one step at a time — walking 3 miles a day and eventually getting on her bike.
She is applying this same balance to her concerns around safety and running this event.
“Safety is our No. 1 tenet — this includes rider safety and supporter safety in this pandemic,” she said.
“Now we are thinking about what will allow us to be safe. But, we’re also trying to be a ray of hope of the future to think about having something in November.”
