This morning, along with 30,000 other runners, I registered
for the Broad Street 10 miler. The website wouldn’t load, I lost the
information I entered more than once, I got stuck on pages that told me the
service was unavailable or illegal. But, in a fury of determination and
annoyance, I hit the refresh and back buttons approximately 3,293,812 times,
which seemed to be obsessive enough to get me in before the race sold out. In
less than six hours.
Last year, the same race sold out in four days. The 2012
Chicago Marathon recently sold out its 45,000 spots in six days, compared to 31
days a year ago, and 35 weeks a decade
ago. In the fall of 2010, registration for the 2011 edition of the Boston
Marathon (25,000 spots) sold out in 8 hours. I registered for that race and can
tell you the feeling was much the same as this morning – locked screens, entry
forms being erased, moments of panic. The prediction for that race was that it
would close in two weeks, but it took eight hours.
What’s the deal? One obvious reason is more people are
running than ever before. Participation in long distance events continues to
increase. In 2002, 325,000 people finished marathons; in 2010, 503,000 people
did. But another reason is the Tickle Me Elmo Effect: when we know everyone
else wants something, we trample each other to get it. When you add in
runners—a group of people who by their very nature are prone to wanting to beat
others to a finish line—and tell them there’s a chance they will miss an
opportunity if they stall, they will jump on it. With the popularity of Twitter and Facebook, it has only
gotten worse. Without fail a few days before a popular race I see multiple
tweets about the likelihood that the race will close, which only makes me want
to run it more. Honestly, when the Chicago Marathon was filling up in record time
I thought, oh man, I might miss that opportunity! But I don’t even want to run Chicago this year.
Clearly, we can’t go on like this. If a race goes from
selling out in weeks, to days, to hours, what can we expect for next year’s
version? Minutes? Seconds? I’m pretty sure websites can’t handle that. And if
they could, where does that leave the people that can’t get to their computer
at exactly the minute registration opens? We can’t be rearranging work
obligations, meetings, etc. to sign up for a race. Although I wouldn’t put it
past some of us runners...
The Boston Marathon tackled the situation by decreasing the
qualification time by 5 minutes and making registration a rolling admission.
The new process debuted for this year’s race and seemed to go smoothly. I like
the solution of setting harder standards—this is the quintessential race you
have to qualify for. Make it harder and people will rise to the occasion. The
thing I don’t like is the rolling admission. Rolling admission means you can
finally get your Boston Qualifier (BQ) and still not get in, because you
qualified with a 3:25 and people with a 3:15 get to sign up three days before
you. (This doesn’t sound too much better than a frozen computer screen.) To me,
that makes the BQ standard slightly meaningless. If the standard is a 3:35 and
you beat that, you have just as much right to be there as a 3:15 runner.
But what about races that don’t have qualification
standards? Should they adopt them? I don’t think so. I love Boston because it
stands out in that regard, but I love
all other marathons because anyone willing can sign up and tackle the distance.
Hugely popular races like the NYC Marathon and the Cherry Blossom 10 Miler have
lottery systems. You sign up within
a certain time frame (generally a few weeks), and they literally pick your
number randomly. (The Broad Street 10 miler is giving away a few more spots in
this way over the next few days.) For NYC you have about a 1 in 10 chance. There
are ways around this—raising money for a charity, running a certain qualifying
time, having run every NYC for 15 consecutive years, or getting rejected three
years in a row (though they recently made even these standards harder because it encompassed too many
people!) A race like the NYC Marathon is a once in a lifetime experience, and I
encourage you sign up for the lottery and try your luck. But it’s unsatisfying.
As runners, we make our own luck; we work hard, we see results. Lotteries and
games of chance aren’t appealing.
What’s left? It’s unfeasible to make races larger. Most
races are capped because of the nature of the course, start and finish areas,
and the length of time roads can be closed and police can be present. For
example, the Boston Marathon is significantly smaller than NYC or Chicago, in
large part because the road the race starts on is incredibly narrow. Squeezing
25,000 people through, even in three waves that take over an hour, is difficult
enough.
Honestly, I don’t have a solution. If you have any thoughts,
leave a comment below, or contact a local race director – they are desperate
for new ideas. In the meantime, it might be useful for everyone to calm down a
bit and try not to freak yourself and others out. Of course, I’m being
hypocritical saying that, as I’ll admit to writing multiple emails to friends
and family yesterday saying to register early. And when the next race comes
around, I’ll be right there with you, overloading the website.
Dream big,
Teal
Looks like Charlottesville marathon registration is still open as of this point, obviously not as high profile as the rest of them. How late do you think it will stay open? Can you register on race day? haha
ReplyDelete