Full Disclosure

As some of you may have noticed, I recently added some advertising to this blog.  This is mostly because The Classic is product intensive and if you run it both you and your bank account will be exhausted before you even start the race, running around town buying various things.  Despite the motto of "No Gear, No Fear", gear is important for the race and directed advertising is handy for those who don't know what to buy or even where to start.

Some FTC guidelines recently went into effect regarding bloggers and kickbacks.  Since nobody can actually understand what the guidelines mean and how they apply, I'm giving you the full disclosure about my relationship with my advertisers and any products I have endorsed. I'm not going to be the poor shmuck test case that gets sued for not disclosing something. 

Nobody actually has yet, but if anyone were to actually click on some of the google ads I might get a few cents.  In reality, I'll probably never see any actually coin because you have to reach a certain dollar amount ( I think $50) before they send you a check.  The chances of me making $50 from ads on this site are extremely remote.  If you were to buy something off amazon, REI or Endless.com within a certain amount of time after clicking on the ads on this blog then I would get a very small percentage of that sale.  I don't have complete control of the advertising but I've tried to only list cool stuff relevant to adventure racing and training. 

No company has ever sent me products and all of the stuff I have reviewed was bought by me.  Except for that cool Sherpa Adventure Gear jacket that I gave a link to once.  My brother-in-law gave me that and I would buy it anyway even if I didn't already have one. 

Yes, believe it or not, I'm not getting rich off this blog and the time I put into researching and posting is my small contribution to making the race better and developing the community of extreme adventure racers in Alaska.  The adventure racing community in Alaska is so small, we're almost family and I think contributing to community is important.  

And since we're talking about complying with the law here, I spent the last four months negotiating, goading prodding, and cajoling the Anchorage Daily News into letting me post the full text of their older Wilderness Classic articles.  They hemmed and hawed and finally decided that their copyrighted, archived articles of the Classic are so valuable, they will only let me post the full text of three articles.  Theoretically, I could post links to the other articles but they are older, they're in archives and the Daily News can't (or won't) spend the 60 minutes they said it would take to pull them out of archives. 

I'm not going to get dinged for posting copyrighted material but what I can do is post race results from each year and under "fair use" rules write a summary of each article.  I'll give you the specific date it was published and search terms so you can look it up in the ADN archives.  I'll even tell you how to legally avoid paying ADN for accessing archives. 

So in true Alaskan form, this post is my one finger salute to the FTC. I intend for this blog to be a good resource for Classic racers and adventure racers in general so stay tuned and I'll keep posting useful information.