Today was the big day... the day when the New York City Marathon registration period opened. The vast majority of spots up for grabs in the many different methods of registering are not first-come-first-served, you can take the entire 2-week registration period to enter. However, for those of us who have run a time qualifying race at a non-NYRR event, we HAD to register today, since our limited slots are first-come-first-served (rather than using Boston's method of fastest times compared to age group qualifying time).
NYRR never specifies the time registration will start, though it is typically noon. Such was the case again today.
I was part of a Facebook group chat trading tips and tricks, including ways to "game" the system and get as many different browser windows open as possible while still being able to track them to make sure to jump on whichever one gets through the virtual queue to the actual online registration first. I set up my several browsers and was on NYRR's website about 30 minutes ahead of time. Tension was rising within the group with each passing minute, worrying about whether we would have to wait eons to get in, despite best efforts, and registration would sell out before we got to register.
Noon arrived, and I was dutifully bouncing between the 6 windows (4 in one browser, 1 in a second browser, and 1 on my phone) checking the "running man" status bar. In less than 5 minutes, the singleton window in the Safari browser in incognito mode finished its race and got me into the registration site. "Holy cow! I'm in!"
I quickly signed in (since that was necessary anyway, and helped autofill information), got to the registration page and filled it all out. Less than 5 minutes later, I was done. Yes!
Less than two hours later, I got the confirmation e-mail about my entering (though not confirmation yet that I've got my slot), and the "pending" status is visible in my NYRR account. Phew! I can now relax and don't need to cancel the hotel reservation I made about a month ago (since I don't plan on entering NYC via marathon again; I'll only join via time qualifying given I've run it multiple times).
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