At the end of October I must have had some free time on my hands because I threw my hat in the ring for two marathon lotteries -- the BMW Berlin Marathon and the Bank of America Chicago Marathon.
The Berlin entry was a longshot -- I've tried for several years to get into the London Marathon and once to get into the Tokyo Marathon with no success. Both races have separate lotteries for foreign entries, making the chances extremely small to get in. I had no idea what my chances were with Berlin but figured it was the same.
Chicago, well, that was different. The two previous years in which I entered the lottery for my hometown's race -- in 2010 and 2016 -- the lotteries opened in February and you received word around April.
After the October 2016 race, however, the marathon opened the lottery at the end of the month and notified you if you were in by the end of the year. I was still coming off of the stress fracture in my shin and really it was too soon for me to decide to want to go through training for another marathon that soon. So I didn't apply.
This year, however, I loved seeing pictures of the people participating in a race that I still loved. I've kept myself marathon-free for all of 2017 and thought it would be great to run it in 2018.
But when I received notice that I was accepted in the Sept. 16 Berlin marathon, some worries immediately popped into my head -- the Chicago marathon is literally three weeks later and waay too soon to recover and continue training for a second marathon.
The only time I did two marathons in that close of a period of time was in 2014, when I did the Marine Corps Marathon in October and then the Honolulu Marathon as a basic fun run about six weeks later in December. I remember the Honolulu race was extremely painful, it felt like my fitness had gone out the window in an extremely short period of time.
I'd actually tried to stack marathons again in 2016, with the Chicago race in October and then the Chevron Houston Marathon the following January. Yet I didn't even go to that race after I felt bogged down by training that December and felt my focus was gone.
So whew! I save the $195 it would have cost me to participate in Chicago. Yes, you can defer to the next year if accepted into the race and didn't want to run in it but you forfeit the race fee and must pay it again the next year.
I'll keep applying. It would be great to somehow qualify for guaranteed entry under the new time guidelines the Chicago marathon released this year. I don't see any statistics from the race but I wonder if the increased guaranteed entries affected the number of lottery entries available.
No comments:
Post a Comment