Innovative Ideas Made First-Ever Race a Great Success

Mountainside Fitness had a HUGE 2011 – they celebrated their 20^th Anniversary in May and brought a new and exciting twist to a race/obstacle course – AZ Urban Race in early November. Sensational Events is proud to have been the event producer on both events for this growing, Arizona-based fitness company.

On Saturday, November 5^th Mountainside Fitness was the presenting sponsor at the AZ Urban Race, a 3-mile, 10-obstacle challenge course at Salt River Fields (SRF) to benefit the Make-A-Wish Foundation of Arizona. This first year event was tremendously successful with more than 2,500 adult participants and 460 Phoenix Children’s Hospital – Kohl’s Kids Rock Stars taking part in the Kids Urban Race.

An event like this just doesn’t happen – it takes the right team and a serious amount of detail planning to make it successful. Working directly with the Race Director, Mario Arce, we gathered the best in the business to make the race team including Race Place Events and Zazoosh Event Photography. Mario was a former competitive runner and he new the in’s and out’s of how a race should function so the logistics of the race itself was fairly uncomplicated to him. The set up for the festival at the registration/finish line was a piece of cake for me since dealing with registration, sponsors, vendors, bands, food concessionaires, etc are all a part of my world. From the website to the race day program, every detail was carefully crafted. Even the precautions that were taken during a windy and raining set up were a part of our “what if” scenarios.

Now that we’ve got the details covered but what about the budget. A race like this costs money to produce, but most importantly, the purpose of this event was to support the Make-A-Wish Foundation of AZ, so a plan had to be put in place from the start to capture funds. Based on my experience with coordinating charity events I designed the AZ Urban Race sponsorship program that outlined the sponsorship levels and their benefits. This marketing piece is the key ingredient to any fund-raising event and helped the race sales team land major sponsors such as the Arizona Diamondbacks, Blue Media, Phoenix Children’s Hospital and Clif Bar. The current relationships that Mountainside Fitness has with these companies played a major role in their trust of this event and eventually their participation in the race. It was also very important to invite the Salt River Pima Indian Tribal Council (since it was on their land) and the Mayor of Scottsdale, Mayor Lane, to join in the festivities because of its impact on Scottsdale.

All in all it was a great day and the participants loved the course, had a chance to visit all the sponsors and vendors at the festival, listen to the great music of The Chadwick’s and go home feeling rewarded.

Sensational Events is Arizona’s premier full-service wedding and event planning company, designing memorable events for discerning clients since 2001. With more than 30 years of experience, we are experts in the art of design, planning, production, logistics and budgeting. Sensational Events focuses on experience and innovation, not formula and routine. Anything from under the stars to on the links, intimate or grand, we offer the highest level of personal service. Our event planning team provides turn-key personalized coordination in all our divisions; weddings, mitzvahs, corporate, parties and destination events.

We invite you to contact us today to see how we can turn your event into a SENSATIONAL EXPERIENCE! Call 602-696-4646 or email us at [email protected].