When Signature Events Emerged

Five things I learned about creating in a world of chaos

By Daphne Kirkwood, Founder of iDaph Events

The photograph that accompanies this chapter shows me speaking with WLOS at the first Hendersonville Triathlon in the summer of 2020. I am standing there talking about staggered starts, masks, and the changes we made so people could race safely. What the photograph does not show is how uncertain I felt behind the scenes. I had no idea whether iDaph would survive, whether another government order would stop the event, or how long the world would remain closed.

Only a few months earlier, the Asheville Marathon had been canceled days before race weekend. The equipment was ready, expenses had been paid, and runners had trained and made plans. Then the events and income disappeared while the refunds, expenses, and responsibilities continued. I was also nearing the end of cancer treatment, already thinking differently about stress, health, and the cost of carrying everything as if it all depended on me.

I could not recreate the world we had lost. I had to create within the new world we had.

By the time that camera was pointed at me in Hendersonville, fear was still present, but so was something else. The signature events that emerged between 2020 and 2022 did not begin with a grand plan. They grew from five lessons that changed how I thought about events and about my own role in building them.

1 - Strip away until you can see what matters

The marathon cancellation consumed nearly a month. By the middle of April, I had worked through enough refund requests, expenses, disappointed runners, and difficult communication to look at the business itself. What I saw was frightening. The team gradually became smaller because everyone could see the writing on the wall. With no events, there was very little work and no dependable income. I felt responsible for the people whose livelihoods had become connected to iDaph, and I worried that I had failed them when the plans we had made together disappeared almost overnight.

I pared the business down to the smallest possible version of itself. I canceled every subscription I could find, even those that cost only nine or ten dollars a month, because every expense mattered. When our Fletcher warehouse lease came up for renewal in May, I asked the landlord for a little relief and was told no. An old neighbor I had known for years offered me grace and an incredible deal on a storage space large enough to hold our trailer and equipment. I left the office and warehouse space where our team had worked for years and returned to working from home with only the support I absolutely needed. I thought it would be a temporary solution until income started coming in again, but it ultimately reinvented the way we work at iDaph, even today.

It felt as if the rug had been pulled out and the ground underneath me had shattered. After years of building a company, a calendar, a team, and a physical home for iDaph, I was back where I had started in 2011, sitting at home and trying to figure out the next step. At first, square one felt like failure. Later, I realized that stripping everything away had revealed what the business actually needed in order to live: the ability to adapt, the trust of our community, and a reason to keep creating.

2 - Connection does not require a crowd

By May, I could finally think beyond the immediate shock and cleanup after canceling the Asheville Marathon, our largest and most visible event. People who were accustomed to running, riding, and moving together were not only losing races. They were losing community and an important part of the rhythm of their lives. I remember how divided even the cycling community became. Some people believed that riding in a group and drafting behind one another could spread COVID, while others felt nobody had the right to tell them they could not ride together. The disagreement was bigger than bikes. It reflected how quickly the community itself seemed to be breaking apart.

I tried to stay out of the arguments and avoided social media unless I was sharing event information. That was when I began stepping away from my personal social media accounts. I was tired of watching division spread through our Western North Carolina athletic and fitness community when the rest of the world already felt so chaotic. I am a rule follower, and I never wanted the public to believe iDaph was ignoring a health crisis. I constantly checked every new gathering limit, mask requirement, and government order, then adjusted our plans accordingly. I felt as if I were walking a tightrope between protecting people and finding a way to give them the movement, connection, and sense of normalcy they badly needed.

What became clear was that connection and gathering were not exactly the same thing. A hundred people did not have to stand together at a start line to feel that they were part of something. They could arrive at different times, start individually or in small waves, complete the same course, and share the experience from a distance. That insight gave us a way forward. My job was no longer to produce events exactly as I always had. It was to preserve the feeling underneath them: movement, purpose, connection, and a little bit of normalcy.

3 - Let the rules become the creative brief

I began by asking what people could do individually. I revived the Lung Buster Time Trial Series, which had ended in 2019, because cyclists could complete marked courses without a mass start. At the end of June, we launched the Pop Up 5Ks at Bill Moore Community Park. Participants arrived across a longer window, wore masks until it was time to run, kept their distance, and started individually across a span of a few hours. 

I remember the first Pop Up as a beautiful summer evening. Several folks helped me set up, runners moved through the park in small socially distanced groups, and for a few hours something familiar returned. Because there was no single mass start demanding all my attention, I waited until the final wave had gone and then ran the race myself. That small moment mattered to me.

For a few minutes, I was not the race director trying to save a business. I was a runner again.

The Hendersonville Triathlon also launched that summer using a staggered time trial start. Hendersonville and Henderson County were especially receptive to new event ideas because their parks, businesses, and community had been hit hard by cancellations. Their willingness to work with us gave iDaph room to experiment and create something meaningful within the restrictions.

When it was time to speak with WLOS, I stepped away from others and removed my mask for the interview. I explained the logistics and safety measures, but the larger message was about hope. Following the rules and helping people reconnect did not have to be opposing ideas. The restrictions became our creative framework, and instead of focusing on why an event could not happen, I learned to ask what kind of event the moment would allow.

4 - Build the race around the place

That question led us into Hendersonville again for the first Black Bear Half Marathon and 8K in October 2020. Jackson Park gave us plenty of space to spread people out, and the park staff were excited to welcome an event after experiencing so many cancellations themselves. The course also gave us a way to introduce more people to the Oklawaha Greenway, while the Black Bear name felt connected to the place and to something visitors hoped to see in our mountains.

Race day was an absolute downpour. We started from a dirt parking area, finished on wet grass in another area of the park, and watched everything turn into a muddy, mucky mess. The waves seemed to go on forever that morning, but they kept moving. It was hardly the perfect debut I would have imagined in another season, yet it worked. People raced, the park supported us, and Black Bear proved that a larger point to point event could happen safely.

That success changed the way I saw an idea Jennifer Hensley, then a Hendersonville City Council member and now mayor pro tem, had shared with me before the pandemic. Her dream was to create a race that started at the top of Jump Off Rock and finished in downtown Hendersonville. When she first described it, I mostly nodded and wondered how anyone could manage two locations, separate equipment, transportation, and all the other complicated logistics.

By November 2020, those complications no longer sounded like reasons to dismiss the idea. They sounded like the very features that could make it work. Small waves could leave the mountain, masked runners could ride shuttles, and finishers could disperse downtown instead of gathering in one place. Jennifer already believed in the concept. Now I needed City leaders and staff to believe in it enough to help us bring it to life.

Jump Off Rock launched in May 2021. I remember the relief of seeing people race again and realizing that the unusual logistics had worked. The route did more than satisfy a gathering limit. It showcased Hendersonville from the mountain to downtown and gave the race a sense of place that participants remembered. What began as a solution to a problem became a signature event because the course, the community, and the experience belonged together.

The same lesson was reshaping the Asheville Marathon and Half. In March 2021, we brought the event into downtown Asheville as a Half Marathon only, using a point to point course that finished at Wedge at Foundation in the River Arts District. We kept a virtual option in case illness or another government order forced a change. I initially thought the move might be temporary and that we could eventually return to the estate, but the downtown race was well received and was more sustainable for me.

Cancer treatment and yoga had taught me to listen more carefully to what stress felt like in my body. I began to recognize how much pressure I had carried while trying to make every race detail perfect, always aware that one criticism could threaten the event and the livelihood connected to it. Downtown, I still cared deeply about producing an excellent race, but I did not feel that same weight vibrating through me. Choosing a place was no longer only about what looked impressive. It was also about whether the event, the partnership, and the pressure surrounding it were healthy enough for me to sustain. The full marathon returned downtown in 2022, beginning a new chapter for the race and for me.

5 - Keep what works and allow the rest to evolve

The new events started to form a season rather than a collection of emergency solutions. I knew participants liked a series and enjoyed having more than one goal on the calendar, so in 2021 we created the Appalachian Trilogy around the Asheville Half Marathon in March, Jump Off Rock in May, and Black Bear in October. People could participate in person, virtually, or through a combination of both, and the extra Trilogy medal gave them another reason to stay connected through the year.

In 2022, we launched the RAD Half Marathon and 10K as another point to point experience through Asheville. RAD quickly became one of our most popular events and joined the group of races people began to recognize as distinctly iDaph. With four signature events in the series, participants could choose any three for the Trilogy. The structure stayed familiar, but it became more flexible.

Not every choice we made during COVID needed to last forever. As restrictions eased, we eventually moved the Black Bear start to the same location as the finish. Jump Off Rock remained point to point because that format continued to strengthen the experience. Virtual options became less central, mass starts returned, and the calendar kept changing. The lesson was not to hold tightly to every solution. It was to notice what had value beyond the crisis and give it room to grow.

Looking back

I am glad we are out of that period, and I would never call the chaos a gift. It was frightening, exhausting, and painful. I considered getting what I called a real job and keeping iDaph on the side because I did not know whether the business would be sustainable anymore. When race registrations started picking up again, I felt a kind of relief that is difficult to describe. The business could breathe, the team could begin growing again, and I could plan with something other than fear.

I also knew in my heart that I did not want to walk away. This work was still what I loved, and I felt a responsibility to use what I knew to help our community keep moving. If I could find a safe and thoughtful way to create events, I believed I should. That sense of duty carried me through a period when confidence alone would not have been enough.

A signature event is not created by a clever name, an extra medal, or a marketing plan. It emerges when people return, when a community embraces it, and when the place and the experience begin to belong together. Black Bear, Jump Off Rock, the downtown Asheville Marathon and Half, and RAD each found that connection in a different way. They were born from restrictions, but they lasted because they offered something meaningful after the restrictions were gone.

In the spring of 2020, I thought I had been thrown back to square one. In many ways, I had, but square one was not empty. It held everything I had learned since 2011 about listening, building systems, noticing what people needed, and creating community around movement.

I thought I was starting over, but I was building what came next.

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