Tuesday, May 15, 2012

St. George, Utah Marathon

Have you checked this morning or last night on the St. George Marathon website to see if you got in and believe that you didn't? You might want to check again. Last night I checked and got the reply that 'Sorry, but you didn't get in'. Later on in the evening, I got an email congratulating me on being selected. I followed up and if you used your middle name when you entered, you needed to supply the middle intial [with a space] in the space used for imputing your first name. For example, if your name is 'John Michael Smith', you needed to enter 'John(sp)M' for your first name, and 'Smith' for the last name. I tried it after these instructions and verified that I was indeed selected. The instructions are now on the website, but wanted to inform everyone in case you only checked the website and not the email address you used in entering the lottery. So, there is still hope.

Friday, May 4, 2012

Did you get in? (ING New York City Marathon)

By now you should have received a notice on whether you were or were not accepted into the 2012 NYC Marathon. Bonnie got in, I did not. Of course, we both entered as Non-Qualifiers (meaning we did not meet the qualifying standards) into the lottery drawing that took place on April 25th. But I will be running it through the charitable organization known as ‘Fred’s Team’, in name of Fred Lebow a founder of the NYC Marathon that died of cancer in 1994. If any of you were like me, you were checking the website to see if you got in [you could check your account for that] and kept getting an error message. This was very frustrating as we were told that we would be able to check that after noon (EDT). The New York City Marathon's website could not handle the load as runner's were searching for status after lottery results were announced. The NYC Marathon website was down for most of Wednesday, I finally got to check on Bonnie’s and my status 8 hours later, but am glad I keep checking or would’ve probably pulling my hair out trying to get through. But sometimes we need to thank God for small favors. If you haven’t heard, the ING New York City Marathons suffered various registration/data issues and errors. Some of the runners waiting for confirmation received emails that told them both they were (and were not) in the race and also failed to correct the mail merge fields so the emails stated "Dear $FullName$, $LineSeparator$". That would’ve been worse in my opinion. But both of us are now registered for November 4th for NYC. I need to do some serious fund raising, so expect to hear for me in future updates. But it does look I have my fall marathon planned for this year.