 Welcome to Toffy TV. I am joined by Alan Rothwell from BTR Liverpool. Correct. Alan, pleased to have you in the studio loving the Alan Ball type top that he's wearing there with it. I don't wear it all the time you know. No, no, I'm just loving the fact you've got it on in here. 1966 FA Cup final, when we won trophies, remember those days. Alan, can you explain to me what you do basically? Well, my stocking trade is now delivering road race events and fun runs in the city. I've been doing it since 1994. I've been doing it professionally since 2007. We've got a portfolio of events ranging from 1k, 5k, all the way up to a 52 mile event in a week. Sharp intake of bread. We've got a great portfolio and it's been potentially added to this year with a new event in conjunction with Everton in the community. Interesting. What is BTR Liverpool? What does it stand for, the show? BTR is born to run. That seems to be all I've ever done in my life. I was a young lad on Breck Road. I used to spend a lot of time running. Just because I liked it, purely instinct, and I'm still doing it now, today, some years later. I love the sport. I love it probably more than football, I think. Really? Yeah, it's touching go, but given the Blues' predicaments at the minute, I prefer to go for the run-off than to watch the match, but hopefully that changes on Sunday. Sunday being a nice start. Yeah, so we do a whole range of fun run events. We do half marathon in Liverpool, total 10k. We've been doing the 96.5k for the last four or five years now, which is always well attended by Reds and Blues. Probably the most famous one is the Santa Dash, which we do at Christmas. We've been doing that since 2004, and we had the introduction of the Blue Santa Suits. We'll have a chat about that. Which was, again, brought on by discussion with Everton and the community. We do a lot of work with the Everton and the community team. I've been doing it for a number of years. They're very supportive of our events, and they attend giving out goody bags, t-shirts, water, all the rest of it, all the stuff that you get at the finish. So we've become good pals, really, and they're happy to support them. They made an approach a couple of years ago about creating an Everton-specific event, because although they'd been involved in our events, they didn't have anything that was Everton-centric. But the introduction of the Mental Health Initiative, which they've got going now, and the People's Place project, they asked if we could put on a 5k or 10k. It started with a 5k to see how it goes, because we'd like to make the event as inclusive as possible. And it's in conjunction with, you may remember, Ken Rogers, who was the sportsman. Who is an absolute treasure trove of information about Everton, the district, and of course Everton, the club. So he came up with this idea to create a 5k that sort of took in all the key landmark locations throughout Everton's history. So we sat down and looked at all the locations that he'd identified, even to the point that I think he's identified with the very original pitches he did it with an architectural dig. So the very first pitch, I'm not quite sure where it is, but he's identified it. And we've sort of plotted a star from Everton Park out through Top of Mill Lane where the Everton Library is, out down through St Domingo Tis, because obviously you have to go past Everton Tower, close proximity to the Toffey shop. It's all those kind of landmarks that we've got and plotted away back through to finish at Gooderson Park. It takes in, obviously, Amfield, because we own that first of course, our original home. So hopefully we'll be going to run past there, through into the park, out on Walton Lane, and then across to take a route in past Bullens Road, Gladys Street, Gooderson Road, and then to finish in the park end. Hopefully it's going to be the weekend before the football season starts for next season. OK, so that's the schedule. So that's the schedule. There's a bit of work to be done in terms of the planning and preparation for the various permissions road closures, because there is a lot of prep work that needs to go into actually creating the frameworks there. We've come up with the title of, if you know your history 5, OK? And we should be in a position to actually identify. So you don't just run anything, well, where they are. We're looking at putting a display out where the key locations are. OK. So there will be a border hoarding saying, because I used to live on Breckfield Road North, so I know where the St Domingo Church was. It's not there now. So a lot of the landmarks have disappeared. So we're looking to make, it's not just the run. It's about sort of passing on some of the history. I mean, we all think we know they have it in history, but the more you look at it, the more that you realise and understand that you don't actually know. So I think it would be a good educational tool. Hopefully it will be a good fundraiser for the charity, obviously. And we're looking to be as inclusive as we can so that we'll have a 5K run. We'll have a 5K jog. So if you want to race it off you go, if you want to jog it just to complete it, fine. If you want to start a fresh, we'll have a counter to 5K programme, which we're also doing in conjunction with Liverpool City Council and the LFC community, who are hosting a similar kind of project for people who would like to kickstart and run. And they're doing a series of counter to 5Ks in Stanley Park and surrounding areas in the eight to nine weeks prior to the 965K in May. So we'll probably adopt that and just give everybody eight weeks to work on. Get off this, get out and do a nice little 5K. Everybody who's never done it thinks it's a long way, but I think once you get into the swing of it, it's not really that far. But if it is too far and you don't want to do the 5K, then we're looking to host a walk as well. The same route. So we'll have all the faster runners at the front. We'll have the slower runners, the joggers in the middle, and then we'll have the walking contingent at the back. So there's no excuse really for the true blues to come and support, take part in the event and obviously support a very worthwhile cause. I mean, it's a fantastic initiative to get, like you just said, to get people off the couch and running. Improving our health is massively important. And like you said, fantastic for that and the support for everything in the community and obviously building towards what's going to be the people's place, the mental health thing. So it's absolutely brilliant. How much preparation and how difficult is it to put on these events in a city like Liverpool in terms of road closures and everything else? In this day and age, it's actually extremely difficult now to create new events. You see, when we go back to the good old days of when there was a marathon in the city between 82 and 92, I mean, that went from Hillfoot. It went up through Town Centre. It went as far as Seaforth, turned around and came back. But the idea of closing that kind of footprint of roads is just, you just couldn't do it anymore. So because we all rely on cars, transport, Sunday used to be once upon a time the quietest day, which is why most running events originated on a Sunday. And now Sunday's probably a worse day because all those people that work Monday to Friday, they're out shopping, they're out going, they're out doing. So once you start to look at the footprint where the race route is going to affect people, I mean, obviously in Anfield, it's quite a dense, it's a dense location for residential. So it's not so much the fact that it's only 5K, it's only on Sunday morning for an hour. It's really the ripple effect of what runners closing this particular set of roads. It's what happens out there because if you look at a route from say Everton Park where we use best part of a mile before we go out on the road, I'll say all we're going to do then is cross the end of Everton Road 8, St Domingo Road to cross it. But it stops bus routes, it stops traffic going, if you go that way towards town, you've then got to look at a diversion route from as far back as Low Hill in town. If you go the other way, you're off down Everton Valley at the county road, you can go back as far as Queens Drive because that's the ripple effect of bus routes. And people only want to go from there to there, they've got to go a long way around. So you've really got to get a 30,000 foot view of all the implications because they're quite considerable and that's just for a 5K. At the other end, if you cross Wharton Lane, how easy is that? Yeah, but you've got everything coming up from Wharton Hall Avenue to go through. So we have to plan a fairly tight diversion route to ensure that we don't disallow people trying to access the cemetery on Sunday. Yeah, of course. It's things that you wouldn't think of. It's that knock-on effect. It's perfectly doable, but you have to be very considerate in terms of where you go, what you do, what time and so on and so forth. And in the instance of this particular event, I'm comfortable with the fact that we open up as soon as you pass near Lane, but then that can be opened up because with a point-of-point you start it, you finish down there. The roads can be opened because if you went out and came back, then you've got a longer road closure. So the whole idea was really obviously to get it, to finish it good or something. And originally we were looking at a May date to try and get, somehow, everyone to finish on the pitch because it's redundant. But because of the Rock and Roll marathons on the bank holiday at the end of May, we've got the 96.5 K on at the final weekend of the season. It just couldn't squeeze on the one in May. It was too tight for the sod's law. That particular area was just a wash with races, so we couldn't do it. So we started looking at the beginning of the season. As we all get excited at the beginning of the season, full of hope, doesn't really last very long, there you go. So we thought the impetus of pushing it back to August and giving people a wee bit more time to get on to the character 5K programme if they needed, go on holiday, gives them more time to consider the event. And it gives us all time to push it out there into the public domain so that people understand what's behind it. It's not just another run, there is a rationale behind the whole thing and ultimately that brings it back to everything in the community and the excellent work that they do. The run for 96, you mentioned it there. How important is that for the city? I think it's key and I know we have our differences, particularly in Derbywych as we are now between the reds and the blues. That's a football argument where the whole issue of Hillsborough and what it turned out to be. It was just so sad for everybody that's being involved with it. I don't particularly know anybody but I was affected by it as a 30-odd, back then, without realising it. I ended up taking my two kids there the following day and my mother lived on Blackfield Road North and it just happened. It was sort of like... and you didn't realise what it was. But instinctively so many people, particularly the reds, put a lot of blues as well, just went to Antfield. I was one of the ones that was there just trying to grasp what had gone on and having gone through 30 years of torture and turmoil if you were involved in it. It's a fitting testimony to I think the positive aspect of what Hillsborough has become because the whole introduction of the race was about creating a positive legacy for the local communities. Rather than Hillsborough being something that's very negative and downbeat all the time, the idea which was brought about by one of the reds fans called Dom, he said that he would like to create something positive and contribute something back to the city. We're just a vehicle for the event. We know how to do it. But the whole ethos and rationale about that is about engaging with local communities and we've got food banks involved with it now, kit aid. There's all kind of little spinoffs that bring something that's actually very... there's a very positive contribution to the whole thing and it's an annual and a time reminder, of course, about the 90s people that sadly lost their lives. Well attended and by reds and blues. It's always well attended. This year we've got normally, it's a bit like the Santa dashing that we have because I know a lot of blues that won't wear red. It's all bad, isn't it? So we always make provision for reds and blues t-shirts as we do with the Santa suit. But this year because it's a sort of landmark anniversary, we've dispensed with that this year so everybody taking part will wear a purple shirt. So they've got a purple shirt. Got a big 30 on the back, a football shirt. So there's a certain resonance. So there is no red or blue on that particularly this year. It's about being mindful and respectful as to what the city lost. That would be a fantastic tribute to what went on for as many people to take part this year as possible. People go there because again it's a bit like what we want out of the... if you know your history, 5K. People don't go there to do a 5K. That's just the vehicle. They go there because they are respectful of what happened. And it's to show their continued support to the Hillsborough Family Support Group who have been instrumental. We've even encouraged now Margueris Aspenall to take part. She walks but she doesn't know it. We'll get it as a run one. She doesn't know that quite yet. So it's not about... If you want to run and you want to race, go and do one of our 10Ks or do the half marathon. We'll take on the 52-mile tour of Merseyside in southern. See how you get on? It's different levels of appeal that we have in each of our events. Fantastic. The Santa Dash. Let's have a little chat about that. My Mrs has done it a few times actually. In the blue suit? No, she's just worn a red suit. She doesn't like football, which is great for me because I don't think the household could cope with the pair of us being dingy. But the blue suit is something that is... Did it cause controversy? No, not really. Obviously when we first started doing the Santa Dash back in 2004 it was just red and there was no football connotation at all. It was just red and everybody embraced it and we did it. And then I'm going to blame Everton in the community for this because at some stage in the Diminished and Past they said, wouldn't it be good if? And I thought, where am I going to get blue suit from? And then I thought, it's a lot like messing about that. And then they pestered me a bit more. It's a bit like pester power with kids. Dad, dad, dad. So I looked at it and I have to say agreed to it because the event had no football connotation. It was just some of us winging Evertonians. I'm not wearing a red. So I looked into it and initially Everton in the community wanted to take that over to encourage people to come and run for them. But then it took on a bit of a life of its own. So we introduced the blue suits and of course once the genie's out in the bottle you can't get it back in. So if I said in the second year, the blue suits, we had them last year. So we sort of persisted with it. But my stipulation was that we would keep it to about five or six hundred because I didn't really want it to become it's not a football event, it's a festive event. So I think the curiosity value is probably its biggest selling point. And every year we just find there's a few more and a few more to keep in the blue suits from last year. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's a good addition and I don't think that if you have a Santa in any other city that you get that kind of disparity it can only happen in Liverpool, I would say. I mean it is interesting to me to have gone and supported and have not put the blue suit on everywhere and it is funny. It's a great advert for the city. You know, it shows off. Oh, the event itself. And is that growing every year? It's sort of stabilised. It sort of went on an upward curve to a point about probably four years ago. And because there are now... I created the description, Santa Dash, well I should have done, but I didn't. It was sort of trademark in some way because if you just put Santa Dash into Google or something, basically Liverpool will come up with this load. So they've all... Got onto it. ...stolen my frames. But I take that as a compliment. Of course. Because there's so many... I did say at the outset every city, every town should have one of these because again the energy that it brings the fascination particularly for kids and it's a good... We have a Mini Dash of course specifically for the kids. Right. And what we're finding now is once the younger element do the Mini Dash it's not enough. I want to do the 5K. So it's acting as a step stone to encourage the smaller children to move from a 1K which all of a sudden becomes very childish for them. Of course when they come back the following year, they're a year stronger. So we do get a significant uptake of the younger kids in the 5K which can only be a good thing. Well that can make us that all. You own it too well. You said you're a keen running yourself. Yeah. So what kind of things have you done running achievements, why? Ever any good? No, I'm not talking about winning gold medals at Olympics. It's just dedicated I think. You've done a marathon. First marathon was in 83 and then I did 42 up to 2007. 42. 42. Being all over the place. Have you? Go on. London obviously. Well that was the mainstay. Yeah. I did 22 of the first 25 of London's. I missed the first one. Yeah. I did 22 of the first 25. I did New York six times. I did all the Manchester marathons. I think they were five or six back in the 80s. I've just been all over the place doing them. I've just always loved it. Hence, BTR buns are up. And if I can spread the word, I'm a bit evangelical about getting people to. So just a little bit. Yeah. It's not about being mofarra and achieving something up there. It's more about getting off this couch, doing a little bit, and more people than that do tend to surprise themselves. So I've always been a distance runner, but in 2004 or 2005, the London Marathon Company came knocking. And we'd been, the voluntary group of ours had been hosting the Liverpool Half Marathon. And they said, can we take it over? And I thought, brilliant. What better organisation to take this over and take it up and on? But unfortunately they came to town, if you remember when the big dig was on, when they were doing Liverpool 1. So they couldn't get the sort of liberal use of the waterfront roads, because they just couldn't. They went there. So their patience was very quickly exhausted, and they left after two years. So they said, there's your race back, Al. And of course the voluntary team, they disbanded, they all disappeared off going, doing other things. So there was only really me left. So I had to make a decision to either do it professionally, or just leave it, because I've been involved with it since 94. I couldn't really leave it. So it was a bit of a, it wasn't a retortable question. It was just, yeah, I'll do it. So we started to develop it. Managed to put the marathon on in 2011 and 12 in the city. So we weren't permitted to continue with that for a third year. So we have to leave that. That's where we created the Tour of Merseyside, for an endurance event. Instead of doing 26 miles on one day, we've got six different locations throughout Merseyside. So you do a different distance in a different location throughout the week. Throughout the week. So we've gotten the endurance in there. So how can people register or is the best way to get information about all the stuff? Any of the events, whether it's the new, if you know history 5K, or all the way up to the Tour of Merseyside, but the website for details is www.btrdivacool.com. There you go. You've heard it from Alan. Try and do your bit forever in the community or do the run for the 96 and support that fantastic event as well in May, May the 11th, as Alan said, before make sure you do that. And thanks to Alan for coming in and giving us all the information back in the community. Thanks for watching. See you soon on Trophy TV.