The long and winding road to any North America Ironman really begins with the registration process.
Like the race itself this is a long and sometimes painful process.
It took me 27 agonizing minutes and three browsers to sign up for Ironman Wisconsin this morning.
Let me guess?
Active.com has a 1999 HP server sitting in Jed’s basement handling the online registration.
While I’m sure that thousands of people were trying to sign-up. Let's be real here this is not American Idol voting numbers we’re talking about. They should have a server farm that can handle this sort of load…especially since they know it is coming.
It’s pretty funny how the mind works. How quickly it goes from not being sure it wants something to desperately wanting that thing in the beat of a heart…especially when that thing is in very short supply.
I talk to a lot of first time IM Newbies and they really spend a lot of time debating if they should sign-up for an IM race. They spend a lot of agonizing over this decision...as they should.
But the real question is not should I sign-up, but can I sign-up?
Today online registration for IM Moo (Wisconsin) closed in about an hour. That means if you had a meeting at work at 10:00 Central time you were pretty much out of luck.
This meant that several of my friends were unable to sign-up for the race.
They only have one chance, one race now; IM Flipper (Florida) if they want to race in North America next year. And that will sell out even faster as it is the easiest IM as well as the race of last resort.
“So question you have to ask yourself,” as Clint Eastwood is famous for saying is not “Do I want to do an Ironman, but can I get into an Ironman?”
I hope that this makes your personal decision process a bit easier.
Congratulations to everybody, who managed to sign-up for IM Moo. I’ll see you there.
And Good Luck to all of you still looking for a race next year. May the online registration Gods smile upon the first step of your long journey!
