Once again I sit in an airport gate lounge, awaiting a flight. And once again, I’m sitting waiting to hear back from a variety of people. It’s as if instead of sending emails I’m stuffing a scrawled message in a bottle and tossing it into the sea, hoping against hope that someone finds it and then gets it to the addressee.
I messed up and wound up paying an extra $70 for a series of races because I kept checking for the mail-in registration form on an old website; it kept promising registration would open in late July and I just assumed they hadn’t gotten it up and running. I finally sent an email and discovered they had moved to a new website and domain and I missed the cutoff by a week for the early bird special. My fault, to be sure, and indicative that I should’ve been more aggressive in pursuing the details.
I’m still waiting to hear back from the Tokyo Marathon regarding my lottery results. The odds are NOT in my favor. As I may have mentioned previously, the organization did reveal the applicants for the race…
**Breakdown of Applicants**
As of August 31, 2016 5:00 pm JST
Total number of general entry applicants（Marathon, 10km） 322,703 entries
1. Marathon: (26,370 places*) 321,459 entries**
2. 10km: (400 places*) 1,244 entries
(*Numbers of places assigned to the general lottery entries exclude the following number of priority, charity entry places, etc. from marathon and 10km total entry places (35,500 and 500, respectively.)
(**The number of marathon applicants is higher than those from past races.)
If my math is right, I’m looking at a 8.2% chance of getting a bib. I’ve looked at MarathonTours but they’re already on a waitlist (and ungodly expensive to boot). TravellingFit still has slots but they too are pricey (albeit not as pricey at MT).
They’re supposed to announce the lottery results by Mid-September… which for my money means, ya know, today — September 15th. And thanks to date lines and time zones, it’s actually already September 16th in Tokyo as I type this.
Besides that, there’s my backup/twofer option with the Kyoto Marathon. They’re supposed to announce lottery results at the end of the month… and yet even though my odds are much better there, there still aren’t any guarantees:
According to their website, Kyoto has a field “up to 16,000.” If that’s the case, I’m looking at a 26.5% chance of getting in.
And then there’s Boston. Thanks to aging into the next bracket, I can submit my application for running in 2017 tomorrow at 10 AM. I’m traveling so I’ll need to find a WiFi cafe around 4 PM my local time to do so. Fingers crossed on that one too… I already bought this t-shirt. I hope I haven’t jinxed myself. If so, I can take comfort in the fact that I DID qualify.
And so I wait.
Man, I’m sick of sitting around airports. But until we get our Star Trek transporter, it’s sometimes the price one has to pay to get from point A to point B.
Despite my best efforts, I can’t run everywhere… although I try.