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Participating in a race is the reward to many runners for weeks or months of training. But races present certain hazards. Here are five hazards that your fellow racers can present.

Hazard: Talking on a cellphone

“Distracted driving” is now appreciated by most motorists as a description of how dangerous it can be to talk on a cellphone while driving. Unfortunately, “distracted running” is not as well appreciated by many runners. And some of those runners create a hazard by talking on cellphones during races. While this is safe to do when such a runner has cautiously stopped on the side of the road or trail before making or taking a call, this is not safe for a runner to do while running.

Avoid this hazard by looking for runners with hands to heads and by runners who are running more slowly than those around them (because wireless headsets may be involved!).

Hazard: Listening to music with earphones

This hazard has become so common that some racing authorities ban earphones on the race course. If a runner is listening to music through earphones, then he or she is unlikely to hear emergency-responders, as well as fellow runners, as quickly as he or she should. And this failure to hear the sounds of the racing environment can lead to all sorts of accidents.

Avoid this hazard by looking for tell-tale cords hanging from other runners’ ears.

Hazard: Running backward

You may occasionally see a runner who is running backward along part of a race course — perhaps to work out some stiff muscles or joints or perhaps while calling out motivational messages to the runner whom he or she is facing. But runners do not have rear-view mirrors, and hazards abound in races, so someone who is running backward during a race can cause many problems.

Avoid this hazard by simply noticing when you see faces — instead of the backs of heads — in the racing crowd ahead of you.

Hazard: Wearing a bulky costume

Some races seem to attract runners wearing wacky costumes. While a costume can make the spectators laugh, it also can obscure the costume-wearer’s vision, which can lead to him or her running into others or more easily tripping on hazards that most runners will see and avoid.

Avoid this hazard by staying away from runners with costumes, especially ones that obscure their vision or can interfere with the movement of their feet.

Hazard: Running two or three abreast

This is a special kind of hazard. Some people have trained all season together for your race, so they want to complete the race together. Unfortunately, they can obscure your vision of what lies ahead, and they can abruptly move “in bulk” across a road or trail when one of them decides to stop for water or a toilet break.

Avoid this hazard by being extra cautious when passing a “wall” of runners.

Research indicates that most salespeople put 80-90% of their time into presenting and demonstrating and leave only 10-20% of their time for other things. Professional salespeople, however, spend only 40% of their time presenting or demonstrating; not more than 10% prospecting; and about 50% of their time qualifying and planning.

Let’s look at these figures one more time. The professionals spend half as much time demonstrating or presenting as the average salesperson does, yet we find that he or she still manages to turn in at least twice the volume. And this is a conservative figure. Actually, the professional brings in between four and ten times as much business as the average salesperson will. It’s not uncommon for a single salesperson to outsell the entire bottom half of the sales force, and keep on doing it month after month, year after year.

So what is it that the true professional does to stand above the rest? By far the greatest difference lies in his or her attention to and ability at planning sales, at selecting and qualifying the right people to sell to, at overcoming objections and closing, and at deserving and obtaining referrals.

So as important as presenting and demonstrating is, if you do it with the wrong people because you didn’t qualify properly, it’s all for nothing. If you’re working with the right people, but you let their objections beat you because you haven’t prepared properly, it’s all for nothing. And if you have no capability in closing, you’re working for nothing. If you can’t close, many sales you could and should make will go to the next competitor who comes along because you built the structure for the sale but couldn’t close the door before he or she got there. You have to be a strong presenter or demonstrator to sell strongly. You also have to qualify strongly, handle objections strongly and close strongly.

There are three things you should cover in your presentation:

1. Tell them what you’re going to tell them. This is your introduction.

2. Tell them what you’re there to tell them. This is your presentation.

3. Tell them what you just told them. This is your summary.

That’s the outline of all successful speeches, presentations and demonstrations. In other words, we use repetition. We don’t say exactly the same thing three times, of course, As outlined above, we begin by introducing our new ideas, then we cover our points in depth and relate them to our future clients’ interests and needs and finally, we draw conclusions from our points and indicate the direction that things should take.

Repetition is the mother of learning, yet average salespeople don’t like repetition. For one thing, they have used their material so many times that it’s stale to them. All too often, average salespeople have gone worse than stale on their presentations and feel it would be better off buried. The professional, on the other hand, never tires of phrases that work, ploys that sell, and ideas that make sense to his or her buyers.

There is no doubt about it, one of the keys to the professional’s greater skill at presenting or demonstrating lies in his or her ability and willingness to use repetition effectively to reinforce every point. He or she doesn’t mind repeating the sales point because he or she knows it leads to repeated sales to the same type of clientele.

So think in terms of tell, tell, tell and remember: Repetition is the seed of selling.