Pablo Picasso is famously quoted as saying: “Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.” Although he is right, if you know the question you want to ask, having quick and easy answers to those questions makes computers quite handy.
I’ve been suffering from a rather tired body and post race blues the past month. My muscles have been tight, my running has felt forced and robotic and I haven’t enjoyed it as much as I normally do. This often happens at the end of a long season. By most accounts, I’ve had a very enjoyable and successful race year and I’ve enjoyed my running, but, like most things, running is cyclical and I’m at the low end of a cycle at the moment.
I find these times useful to reflect on what I’ve done, how I did them, what I want/need to change and what I want to do next. Part of this means researching new adventures and races to check out. I’m very curious to try my hand at some hundred milers next year, so I’ve been researching events. To be honest, there are so many amazing and tempting races out there and I have a quickly expanding bucket list of races that I want to try and places I want to visit. Unfortunately, due to my life circumstance, priorities and physical ability, I can only do so many races a year. Some people seem to be able to race every weekend and be successful. I’m not one of those athletes. I have to be a bit more strategic and plan out my year, focusing on one or two key events and racing some other races a bit underdone, or overcooked from training. So as I peruse and research the various races, I’m once again amazed at the wealth and depth of information available online.
Being the wily old veteran that I am (sarcasm), I remember the days when you had to go to a specialty run store, browse through the mountain of paper in a race package, or have your local club, or the race itself, mail you race info and the race entry, normally a 3-fold brochure, with a grainy picture, some basic race details and a page for your registration information, with spaces too small to really be useful, or legible. You’d fill it out by hand and mail in a cheque. I’d inevitably make a mistake and end up in the wrong category, or my name would be bastardized as someone would try to decipher the hieroglyphics that I try to pass off as handwriting. Madam Candell did well in the 16-19 female age category a few times about a decade (or more) ago. In short, the process was slow and it sucked. It was highly exclusive, you had to know where to go and where to look and if you weren’t “in the loop” already, there was a good chance you could miss out. After the race, you’d have to wait for club and regional newsletters, or national and international magazines to be published to find race results, if the race directors decided to submit them.
Today, all a newcomer to the sport needs to find out about and register for a race is to know roughly the when, what, where and the type of race and have the ability to Google, to find out as much as they need to know. From there, they can look up the race details on the race website, many of which have fairly detailed descriptions, including course profiles, elevation charts, Google maps, videos, where to park, how to get to the race, local accomodation, where aide stations are, what the finisher medals look like etc… They can then fill out the race details very quickly & efficiently online.
Sites like Ultrasignup, sportstats, raceheadquarters, racedaytiming...have consolidated lists of races and offer registration services and post race results almost instantly, all of which make the race process move seamlessly. There’s no risk of the entry getting lost in the mail, you get an instant email confirmation and your payment goes through then and there. You can then scan the list of other participants and figure out the level of competition, know which of your friends will be there and plan ride shares to the race. If you’re very analytical, you can link to previous results and figure out roughly how long the race will take, who you’re likely to run with and pretty much any other detail that might interest you and help you plan for the event. Big races will have links to training groups, expert advice, some offer training plans, what to expect, all of which help to make the experience easier for newcomers.
Don’t get me wrong our current online system has its flaws. There’s a common chorus of complaints about how quickly races fill up these days. Races no longer necessarily begin when the gun goes off, the first winners are those that can be first to the keyboard when next year’s race entry launches. Popular races, with limited fields, sell out in minutes of opening registration. You often have to have a calendar alert of when a registration goes online and then hover over the race website months in advance, trying to time your access down to the minute of when the online registration begins . If you have a slow internet connection, an old computer, can’t find your credit card fast enough, or you can’t type, you risk missing out on the narrow window when you can sign up, before all the other keeners beat you to the punch!
In order to offset some of the unfairness in this process, such as having to be in a meeting, or at the birth of a first child when your favourite race opens, races have started holding lotteries, where you apply for the right to have your name entered into a draw to win the priviledge of paying for a race entry. Like the NFL, or NHL draft, people sit around anxiously speculating and hoping to have their name pulled, earning them the right to put in months of training and then suffer horribly for a few minutes, hours or days, depending on the race, several months down the road. Although it can be frustrating, this isn’t a bad thing. It shows the increased popularity of the sport and definitely rewards race directors who repeatedly put on high quality events. These are usually the races that I’m interested in doing. For the elitists, or veterans, who complain about races filing up early, this process still laregly rewards people "in the know", since we share information with each other about when race registartion opens and race directors are usually good about letting previous entrants know about the timing of registartion. For full disclosure, I'll admit that being recognized as an "elite" runner, whatever that means, I am granted certain registartion priviledges at some events, so I have circumvented this process at some events, but other races are more egualitarian, treating all athletes the same.
So what all this means is that despite having a natural tendency towards being spontaneous with my racing, I have to plan things out. I’m spending a fair bit of time thinking about what I might want to do 6, 9 or 12 months down the road, commit to some races, recharge my batteries and legs and then get out the door and train for them. At the moment, I’m leaning towards two of the Ultra Trail Mount Fuji, Western Sates (if I get in via the lottery) and Ultra Trail de Mont Blanc, for next year, but I’m open to suggestions, so feel free to fire away with recommendations near and far…
In other internet news, I have two interviews up on the web. If you have some free time, feel free to check them out:
http://www.healthynomics.com/lifestyle/interview-with-adam-campbell-mountain-and-trail-runner/
http://trailrunner.ca
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