Thursday 15 January 2009

Of Sportive Success and Failure

Already this year I have experienced both, and that's just in entering.

6th January was the long awaited day when entries for both the Fred Whitton Challenge and the Etape du Dales went live. FWC was by post from midnight, and EdD online from midday.

By breakfast time on 6th the Fred Whitton website had already had the paper entry for withdrawn owing to the number of downloads far exceeding capacity. Good thing I printed it off at midnight. Unfortunately, this was all to no avail as I heard this week I didn't get through the ballot. Apparently over 2,000 people applied for the 800 places. At £40 each this shows how much more popular these events are becoming.

Further evidence came in the form of the SportIdent website as the 12:00 time for Etape du Dales entries to go live approached. By 12:03 the website had already crashed under the weight of attempted hits. By 15:25 all 800 places had gone on that event too, but by that time I had one of them.

One out of two ain't bad, and it does free up the weekend of 9th May for my local 200km Audax. "It's an ill wind that blows everybody over" as John Lennon is credited with saying.

2 comments:

the E.Port Sloth said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Simon Lewis said...

Bad luck for not getting into Fred but good news about Dales. I wanted to do both but could only spare the time and cash to do one so I tried entering the Fred and thankfully, got a place. Next year the Dales.