In Champaign-Urbana it’s common knowledge that the last weekend in April is always race weekend. Residents spend weeks mentally preparing for an influx of people and shut down roadways. The slate of races bring in thousands of runners to Champaign County creating an economic boost unlike any other. At Campus Ink, we are proud to support the Christie Clinic Illinois Race Weekend by supplying race shirts, signs, banners and more.
So what exactly goes into a multi-race weekend? Let’s break it down:
~10,000 shirts
Between runners and volunteers we printed a LOT of shirts over the last month. Each race had a unique shirt and design. On top of that, the race weekend requires a lot of extra hands on deck. Thousands of people volunteer to direct traffic, work the expo, hand out medals and more. Each volunteer gets a neon shirt to help easily identify them.
~9,102 square feet of banners/signs
As you can imagine races require a lot of signage. Go this way. Don’t go that way. Grab your shirt there. Get some water here. You get the point. We printed a lot signs – everything from vinyl banners to posters and everything in between.
19.5 hours spent at the ARC
Unloading, sorting and staging 10,000 shirts takes a bit of time so the ARC becomes something of a second home to us over the course of race week. We then rely heavily on the volunteers to help us hand out the shirts for each race.
6 shirt designs
Each race is unique and special in it’s own right and so are the shirts. We spend months working with the race director and team members to nail down each design. Nothing gives us more joy than to see Memorial Stadium filled with t-shirts we printed.
3 hours, 50 minutes and 21 seconds
Campus Ink’s Marathon relay team, Runny Ink, finished the race under 4 hours putting them in 20th place out of 71 teams. The relay team consisted of Campus Ink team members Sean Ellenby and Lindsay Quick, student intern Matt Booden and Kassidy Brown (wife of Sean). You really do a lot of team building when running a collective 26.2 miles.
