More China Fun

I continue to stalk the Beijing Marathon's websites (English and Chinese).  There is a countdown calculator that appears to be counting down the days until Oct. 14.  But of course still no actual date announcement, and nothing about registration.

I got kind of excited when I saw this on the Chinese site last week:

2012北京马拉松报名相关

         2012北京马拉松的报名相关事宜正在准备中，具体报名方法与时间我们将提前一周公布在北京马拉松的微博和官网上，敬请各位跑友留意，感谢您对北京马拉松的支持。

So I emailed my friend in Shanghai to see what it said, and all that excitement vanished...

We are in preparation of Beijing 2012 Marathon Game, detailed information on registration will be posted on our website and mini-blog (which is something like twitter) one week before the game.  Please pay close attention and thank you for your support.



Well, it makes me glad that we went ahead and bought plane tickets already.  My level of anxiety is going down.  If the marathon doesn't work out, so be it.  I can always run in San Antonio, even though that won't be fun.  And hopefully it will still work out to run Beijing -- it will just be something I register for the week before.

The funny thing is that registering for a marathon is always a big guessing game.  If you register early, it's usually cheaper and sometimes it's the only way to get in to some of the big ones that sell out.  But then there's always the risk that you don't know you'll be able to run X months down the road -- possible injuries, work commitments, possible training derailments, whatever.

But now, with Beijing, there's no risk of wasting the money!  I mean sure, plane tickets to and from China were expensive, but we wanted to go anyway, and we ended up picking the dates we wanted, rather than waiting until the marathon date was set.  But now, if something happens so that I can't run, at least I won't have lost money (and doubtless plenty of headaches trying to navigate the Chinese registration process).