As an idiot who managed to be out of town Tuesday, I have restrained myself from commenting on the caucuses. I experienced none of the traffic jams, witnessed no cynical manipulation of the process and missed entirely the glorious turnout of idealistic citizens.
I do, however, know a bit about the chaos that ensues when amateurs try to manage unexpectedly large turnouts. Volunteers, many working for the first time, got overwhelmed by bad work flow and by the large number of people who showed up expecting to express their preferences with a minimum of process.
I am inclined to be charitable because I, too, learned this stuff the hard way.
In the early years of what became the running boom of the late '70s and early '80s, I organized distance races around Minnesota. To start, many of them were high-concept, low-turnout events — a Valentine's Day male/female relay, pick-your-distance cross country runs, a run up Lowry Hill and around Lake of the Isles, a Tour de France-style staged series of team races, etc.
Around the state most race directors were like me, putting on one or two events a year out of love for the sport and a desire to give something back. But as running grew in popularity, the numbers made things more complicated. After watching one popular, informally run Wisconsin race melt down, I resolved to do something about it.
For seven years, I served as race coordinator for the Minnesota Distance Running Association. Besides scheduling and promoting races statewide, I developed some new ways to manage the flow of crowds and taught race directors how to set up systems that would yield timely and accurate results. I figured I knew as much as anyone about how to manage a road race — especially the critical finish line.
Then came Get in Gear.
Thirty years ago, it exploded as the first "mega-race" in Minnesota. Until 1978, a big local race was 500 runners. Then sponsors Dayton's and the Star Tribune poured in massive amounts of free advertising, promotion and incentives, making Get in Gear the first event so highly promoted to the fitness runners and joggers who were just starting to discover the sport.
We knew it was going to be bigger — maybe four times bigger than what we'd handled before. But we didn't realize what those numbers would do to systems that had worked so well at smaller scales.
If we'd looked nationally, we might've been better prepared. The well-established Peachtree 10k in Atlanta had grown steadily over the years, but in 1976 it more than doubled to 2,300 runners when it got newspaper sponsorship. The next year, it nearly tripled to the 6,500 that overwhelmed the City Park where it was staged.
With lots of volunteer help, a good race committee, an experienced finish line crew and state-of-the-art timing equipment, we thought we were ready for the hordes. I was so confident, I ran in the two-mile fun run before the main event, sprinting back to check up on my chute captains who were organizing the troops manning the 10k finish line.
Unlike the clogged caucuses, which broke down immediately under the swell of people arriving for the 7 pm start, things went well for us for some time after the first finishers came in. But as the middle of the pack arrived, we couldn't keep up. If you can't process people fast enough and get them away from the finish line, things back up and disorder spreads. It becomes impossible to match times with individuals, and once you lose it, you can't recover.
In a laborious post-race analysis, I discovered how a simple error contributed to our downfall. We could not simply add four times the finish line capacity to handle the four times larger crowds.
As I plotted my reconstructed data, I could see when the number of finishers rose alarmingly and then quickly reached the breaking point when our chutes began to fill faster than we could empty them.
The vast majority of the 1,500 or so runners we had added on top of the more serious and experienced 500 we were used to handling were not evenly distributed across a bell curve. In fact, we added very few additional runners to the faster side of the curve; there just weren't that many good runners who weren't already in our events. 
Instead of a bell, the distribution looked more like a Devil's Tower, with most of the runners arriving at 8 minutes per mile and beyond.
The process-choking arrivals at the caucuses were even more concentrated.
I learned a lot from that race and spent the next few years making sure others did, too. Eventually, I got out of race directing, though. I got tired of listening to complaints from people who never helped at a race and never did anything to make the sport better.
They just wanted to show up at the last minute, have their perfect experience and leave their trash behind.
Maybe that makes me an elitist, wishing for a return of the good old days, but I don't think so.
It does mean I'll cut some slack for volunteers who were caught in Tuesday's groundswell.
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