No the circus isn't in town, but Beach to Brother trail running festival director and founder Mick Maher will borrow the terminology to encourage locals to compete this year.

While uncertainty continues to swirl around COVID-19, health restrictions, public health advice and lockdowns, Mr Maher is confident the event will take place on September 26.

If they have to ban those from outside the Mid North Coast attending the event, that's what they'll do.

"The worst-case scenario is we will host the event for the local community only," Mr Maher said.

"Our community has seen a tremendous amount of uncertainty and gone through a lot of hardship over the last two years with the fires, the floods, the storms and now COVID.

"A tremendous amount of events have been cancelled all throughout NSW and nationally, so we feel we owe it to the community to offer a community event as a worst-case scenario and that's what we will do."

Mr Maher said regardless of who could attend the event, they would have COVID-safe policies and practices in place anyway.

"Like any other business, we do have a QR code for the event and all people will have to use that QR code to specify they are at the location," he said.

"We will also check IDs of every single participant during registration and on the day. We won't just be relying on the Service NSW information."

During the registration process, all details will be taken as a snapshot so organisers will have access to that information in the back end of their system.

"If there are any postcodes that are shut down - leading up to, or at the time of the event - we will notify those individuals that unfortunately they won't be able to attend," Mr Maher said.

"What we're saying is locally we will definitely be hosting an event. Whether we're able to host that event for people outside of this region ... there is uncertainty around that.

"The option is leave it until two or three weeks out and submit your entry, but the risk with that is we do have limited entries available."

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