Ironman Canada

I got into Ironman Canada! After much anticipation, I finally signed up and made it into the race.

So why all the excitement about getting into the event?

The official Ironman races in North America typically sell out fast. Because of their popular demand, the sign ups for the following year's race open a day after the current year's race. They open up registration first to the participants doing the current year's event. Next comes the onsite registration at the place of the event. Once all onsite registrations are complete they open up the remaining spots online...of course with two special cases - Ironman Cananda, and Ironman USA (Lake Placid, New York). Because these two events sell out fast, they limit them to onsite registration only.

Another way to register, is through the Community Fund. After the races sell out, they open up the Community Fund - a process where you pay the normal race registration fee ($525) and you pay additional money that goes to charity ($775). The monies usually go to a charity in the location of where the Ironman event is held.

The group that I'm training with were all expecting to enter Canada through the Community Fund. Yup, that's right. We were willing to pay $1300 to enter an Ironman and torture ourselves.

However, this year, they amazingly had a few open spots left to Ironman Cananda after the onsite registration. Because of this atypical scenario, they made an announcement that there will be open spots online on August 29th at 9:00AM. As you can imagine, it's just as crazy as buying Laker Playoff tickets the day they go on sale.

Well, after getting up at 7:30a.m. I was ready to go. Yes, I had to get up really early to make sure I was ready to go. And here's how it played out:

8:30 - Searched Active.com to see if there were any links to regitration page.
8:45 - Still searching Active.com for the link (just in case).
8:55 - Refreshing the Ironman Canada website waiting for the link to the Active.com registration page.
8:58 - Refresh the Ironman Canada site to check if they posted the link up early...it's up!
8:58 - Click on the link - Get an error page on Active.com!
8:58 - Refresh the Active.com page...and viola! It's the registration form!!
8:59 - Frantically filling out the registration form (luckily I saved time by already having an Active.com account). I'm shaking still in disbelief that I'm signing up.
8:59 - Receive a call from my friend Joy while I'm filling out the form. I answer and say "I'm signing up! It's open! Refresh the page!"
9:01 - All Registered! Text all my friends that are also signing up.

And there you have it. We all got into the Ironman Canada race through the normal registration. When I checked back 10 min. later, the race was sold out.

So now..364 days til the race. Time to start enjoying my social life now because next year it's all training ;-)