It is official, the Cherry Blossom 10-Miler has been added to my sh*t list.
The organizers failed to use a bug-free and working on-line registration system. As a result, many runners who were eagerly awaiting to participate in this event, have been unable to register. I am one of those runners. Today I spent the better part of three hours attempting to sign up for the competition. However, due to the registration website’s subpar technical performance, I was unable to achieve my task. Everytime that I attempted to register I would reach a prompt indicating that the server was not working. After three and a half hours, I was informed that registration was closed. At the same time, one of my coworkers succeeded in obtaining a slot, though only attempting to register for less than an hour. It was a very frustrating experience.
If the Cherry Blossom organizers want to organize a truly world-class race, they need to make the registration process fair and efficient. The Marine Corps and Boston Marathons are both events which receive a huge number of registration requests and are able to process them all without any technical issues. So it is not a farfetched idea that a website registration service be able to deal with the large demand.
And that’s the end of my rant.
Cherry Blossom 10 miler, screw you. I will instead use that weekend for a long run in preparation for BOSTON later that month.
