Recruiting and Briefing Course Marshals

Course marshals carry more responsibility than most volunteer roles, since they're often the only person standing between a runner and a wrong turn, an unmarked junction, or a live traffic lane. That responsibility deserves a more deliberate recruitment and briefing process than a general call for volunteers, which is why it's worth treating separately from broader volunteer management.

Who makes a good course marshal

The role doesn't require athletic ability, but it does benefit from someone comfortable being firm and clear with a stream of runners moving past them, sometimes for a couple of hours at a stretch. Local run club members, off-duty event staff, college volunteer groups and, for particularly sensitive junctions, off-duty or coordinating traffic personnel are all reasonable sources. Repeat marshals from previous editions are especially valuable, since they already understand the role and need less briefing time.

Positioning marshals on the course

Every turn, junction, and any point where the race route crosses an open road needs a marshal, not just the tricky ones. It's easy to under-provision marshals at what looks like an obvious, simple turn, right up until a runner in the middle of a pack misses it because there was no one there to point the way. Walk the course specifically to mark marshal points, rather than estimating positions from a map, since some junctions look straightforward on paper but are genuinely confusing at ground level.

• Every turn or direction change on the route, regardless of how obvious it looks on a map.
• Any point where the course crosses a live traffic lane or an intersection not fully closed.
• The split point where different categories diverge onto different distances.
• Any narrow or visibility-limited stretch where runners and any permitted traffic might interact.

Radio and communication setup

For anything beyond a small, simple loop course, a radio network connecting marshals to a central race-operations point is worth the cost and setup effort. It's how you find out quickly if a marshal hasn't arrived, if a road closure has been compromised, or if a runner needs medical attention at a point without a dedicated medical station nearby. Assign radios by course section, with a clear naming convention ("Marshal 4, 6K turn") so operations can locate an issue quickly without confusion over who's reporting.

Where a full radio network isn't feasible for a smaller event, at minimum ensure every marshal has a phone number for a named coordinator and knows exactly who to call. This overlaps directly with your broader medical planning, since marshals are frequently the first people to spot a runner in distress on course.

Briefing marshals before race day

Every marshal should know their exact position, what time to arrive and how long their shift runs, what to do if a runner asks for directions or help, and their specific escalation contact. A short in-person or video walkthrough of tricky positions, in addition to a written brief, closes a lot of gaps that text alone doesn't catch. Confirm again a few days before the race, since marshal drop-off close to race day is one of the more disruptive things to discover on the morning itself.

Marshal deployment is one piece of the larger race-morning sequence. See the race day operations timeline for how marshal check-in and positioning fits alongside everything else happening that morning.