Post by mandiespharm on May 19, 2015 16:41:54 GMT -5
I have not but I've thought about at least the half. We visit there in August every summer and I love running through the neighborhoods. Hmmmm maybe next year....
Post by bostonmichelle on May 19, 2015 17:12:56 GMT -5
I heavily considered it as my first full this fall but went with another race in Massachusetts (Baystate) since a lot of runners in my running group do it. Newport is definitely on my list to do.
Post by jillybean222 on May 19, 2015 18:55:28 GMT -5
I did the half a couple times. I live right next door in Jamestown. There was some drama with the marketing group putting it on. Here's an article from RW last month.
Rival Marathons Battle in Newport, Rhode Island
The smallest state might have two marathons on the same day. By Alison Wade; Published April 8, 2015
Newport Marathon
The marathon that runs through Newport every fall has become a source of conflict for the shore community in Rhode Island. After a battle between two event management companies, it is currently possible to register for two different marathons scheduled to take place in the vicinity of Newport, Rhode Island, on October 11. Gray Matter Marketing is offering a race called the Newport Marathon, while Eident Racing, the company behind the fall marathon in Newport for the past six years, is offering the Newport Rhode Races.
The owner of Gray Matter Marketing, Matt Gray, is a former employee of Eident Racing, owned by John Mathews. Gray left in 2012 and began his own event management company. Both parties declined to discuss the specifics of Gray’s departure, but they agreed it was not amicable.
Though Gray Matter currently holds a permit to put on a race in Newport on October 11, the organization has not yet been granted permission to run through neighboring Middletown, where a significant portion of the proposed race course runs. Eident does not currently have any permits secured, but the company is working on backup plans, including an attempt to get the Newport permit back, applying to host a race that would start and finish in Middletown, and other options Mathews declined to discuss.
“Rhode Island is not the biggest state in the country–in fact, it’s the smallest–but that doesn’t mean we can’t find 26 miles somewhere else,” Mathews told Runner’s World Newswire. “Our number one option is to hold the race that we have been holding for six years, and that has not been resolved yet.”
Gray Matter opened registration for the Newport Marathon and issued a press release about the event on April 7.
“As the event permit holder in the host community of Newport, and having course approval from the Middletown Police Department, we are confident that Middletown Town Council will approve our special event license,” Gray wrote in an email to Newswire on April 7, the day after the Middletown Town Council opted to defer making a decision until the conflict over the race had been resolved in Newport.
Meanwhile, Eident has had the Newport Rhode Races registration online since last fall. “I think it’s pretty much industry practice that if you’re a legacy event, and you don’t see any issues, that you need that full year to market a full distance marathon, so that’s what we did,” Mathews said.
The Conflict Begins
Eident Racing made headlines last year when runners in its marathon trampled sand dunes near the event's start at Easton's Beach. Ten days later, officials in Newport, a community of 24,000 about 20 miles south of Providence, recommended in a memo that “[Eident] no longer be welcomed to host events at any property owned and operated by the City of Newport in the future.” Gray heard about this recommendation at a November city council meeting and began “to discuss an alternative proposal so if Eident were to be denied a permit, that the city of Newport would still have the opportunity to host a marathon,” he says. After discussing the matter with various parties, Gray applied for a permit to host a marathon in Newport on October 11, 2015.
Mathews, meanwhile, did not learn of the problem with the dunes until December, and shortly after he paid the $4,308 bill to repair the damage. In January, he met with Newport Mayor Jeanne-Marie Napolitano and the author and recipient of the memo. Mathews and Napolitano say that because Eident had paid its bill promptly and Mathews apologized, the feeling after the meeting was that the relationship was good between Eident and the City of Newport. After the meeting, Napolitano contacted Gray and asked that he withdraw his application.
Gray honored the mayor's request and sent an email January 29, requesting that Gray Matter's permit application be withdrawn. “I started getting phone calls from other city councilors saying that the mayor did not have the authority to ask us to remove our permit application,” Gray said, explaining that the Mayor is only one of seven voting members of the city council. “I felt like I was being told that we weren’t going to get a chance to even be heard, but then I was informed otherwise.”
Newport's City Council was scheduled to decide which company would get the permit at its March 11 meeting, but at the end of the evening, it appeared there might be no marathon in Newport in 2015. Napolitano's motion to approve Eident's permit application was not seconded, and a vote to approve Gray Matter's permit application ended in a 3-3 tie.
Gray had made council members aware that five charities would receive a minimum of $10,000 were Gray Matter to get the permit, via a revenue sharing model that Gray says his company uses for all of its races. This led one of the councilors to recuse himself from the vote, because a charity his son co-founded stood to benefit, which made the tie possible. In a special meeting the following week, the council voted to give the permit to Gray Matter. Between the two votes, Gray removed the charity that caused the conflict of interest from the race's list of beneficiaries, which allowed the councilor to cast one of the deciding votes in favor of Gray Matter.
Mathews has made it clear that if Eident is going to lose this battle, the organization will not do so quietly. He revealed at the March 18 meeting that he would be putting on a marathon on October 11, whether or not Eident was granted a permit in Newport. If Newport wouldn’t welcome him, he’d go elsewhere.
His primary charge is that Gray Matter has stolen Eident’s intellectual property.
"The people who don’t do their research and don’t understand what’s going on here, there’s a good chance that they might enter his race, if he keeps the Newport permit,” Mathews said. “He’s making revenues off of what we built–on the same weekend with basically the same course. Now if he altered the course and ran the thing in June, I’d be the first one to say, ‘All right, let’s go. Let’s see who can get more people.’ But that’s not what happened.”
Mathews is also accusing Gray Matter of essentially buying the permit via Gray's guarantee of charitable donations. Mathews takes issue with the fact that one city council member who voted in favor of Gray Matter sits on the board of Boys Town, a race beneficiary under Gray Matter’s proposal.
At the March 11 meeting, Mathews told Newport’s City Council, “The code, if you will, in our industry would be that if you’re a competitive company and you want to take over a race, you would buy the race, not buy the permit.”
Though Mayor Napolitano ultimately voted in favor of Gray Matter because she believes hosting a marathon is good for Newport, she was disappointed in the way the events played out. “We shouldn’t have been in the middle of this, as far as I’m concerned. It was unhealthy for our community,” she said. “I find this heartbreaking, that so many people have been maligned, [and the] council has been divided.”
Meanwhile, Mathews will be doing everything he can to put on an October 11 race, in Newport or elsewhere, and to defend the event he believes belongs to his company.
RI? It's on my list. I have heard nothing but great things and Newport is gorgeous. It was actually on this year's race list until the stress fracture issue occurred. I will probably save it for next year.
RI? It's on my list. I have heard nothing but great things and Newport is gorgeous. It was actually on this year's race list until the stress fracture issue occurred. I will probably save it for next year.
RI? It's on my list. I have heard nothing but great things and Newport is gorgeous. It was actually on this year's race list until the stress fracture issue occurred. I will probably save it for next year.
I'm hoping next fall as well!!!!
Depending on how life shakes out the next year, it is on my 2016 list as well.
You DO realize that I grew up there...and have a place for us to stay....and there's a winery that's a client of my father's that is verrrry close to the race....just sayin'...
My h spent 2013-2014 August to June there right off commercial wharf. Speakeasy is my favorite! I love it there! I so wanna run that half
Post by spunkypenguin on May 21, 2015 11:03:17 GMT -5
I ran the half in 2013 and it was a beautiful race. This would not be the year I would want to run given the drama that jillybean222 posted. Any outcome of that feud is going to produce a much different race than in years past...
I ran the half in 2013 and it was a beautiful race. This would not be the year I would want to run given the drama that jillybean222 posted. Any outcome of that feud is going to produce a much different race than in years past...
Eident racing, who originally put on the Newport Marathon, moved their race to Narragansett...2 competing races (5k, 1/2 and full!) in RI Columbus Day weekend. It will be interesting to see how this shakes out! The local running groups are putting out the word to support the Narragansett race instead of Newport but who knows what will happen. I will be in the Bahamas not running either race!