Community and Equity Policy Press Release
HIGH LONESOME 100
Equity and Community Policy Announcement
Over the last three years we have learned and grown a great deal, due in large part to the strength and diversity of our community. Because of this, and due to increasing demand, we are pleased to announce several changes to our policies for 2020. None of these are made lightly and we have worked diligently over the last year to build them, not only with our advisory committee, but also with members of the community and experts at large. Below you will find summaries of the updates and full details available on our website. If you want to look at a specific policy, click the title of that section.
To provide fair and accessible registration, the High Lonesome 100 will be moving to a lottery registration process for 2020. While we had hoped to avoid this for a few more years, the increased demand has given an upper hand to those with faster internet connections, which is often lacking in rural or mountainous regions. In this new system, certain groups will be given more weight, including volunteers (starting this year). Full details of the lottery will be announced by September 2019.
A key component to this new lottery system will be giving the same number of spots to men and women. We will do this by creating two “pools”, one for each gender. Currently we range between 20-22% female participation and without this change, implementing a lottery system now runs the risk of embedding this gender imbalance into our system permanently. We believe such a large imbalance would have a negative effect on our race’s community. In the event that one of the pools doesn’t use all their allocated slots, the leftovers will be given to the other pool.
We have also updated our policies to enable and encourage transgender and non-binary runners to register as their identified gender. We hope that by providing this structure we make it clear to all that High Lonesome is a safe and accepting community for all runners. The High Lonesome began working on this policy with the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) shortly after Western States Endurance Run (WSER) announced their own policy and we would like to commend both WSER and NCTE for their leadership.
Finally, we have expanded our pregnancy deferral policy to now apply to both partners (regardless of gender) and to include childbirth and adoption. Entry may be differed to the following year if a runner or their partner becomes pregnant, gives birth, adopts a child into the family during the time period after registration and before the race. We recognize that a new addition to a family is a team effort and taxing on both partners, and we want our policies to support balance in a growing family.
Thank you,
The High Lonesome 100 Team