#Reverb12 Day 10: Risks

For the month of December, I'm working on doing the daily series of Reverb prompts to help me reflect on the prior year and hope/plan for the upcoming year. If you're interested, join in; I found this to be a very useful exercise when I did it two years ago.

#reverb12 Day 10: Your greatest risk?

What was the greatest risk you took in 2012? What was the outcome?

The answer to this prompt for me relates to work -- gambling in settlement negotiations -- and it worked out well, but I don't want to write about work. 

I guess in some ways, the biggest person risk was buying plane tickets to China based on a little countdown calendar on the Beijing Marathon's website.

It did not work out well for me at all. 

I posted about it as the drama unfolded, but for the last few years (pretty much since the 2008 Olympics), I have wanted to run the Beijing Marathon. And I've wanted to travel to mainland China for much of my life, probably since I was old enough to learn about the world and how many different and interesting places there are, and then realize that as the world becomes more global, differences disappear.

So the Beijing Marathon seemed to be the perfect way to combine an amazing marathon with a trip to an amazing country. I paid close attention to the Beijing Marathon in 2011, knowing it would be my turn in 2012 (and having had experience with some marathons filling up before I had a chance to register, knowing I needed to get a visa, plane tickets, arrange for vacation from work, etc.). In 2011, this is how it went: in the winter, there was a marathon webpage with information about the 2011 race; in June, the registration date was announced; in August, the registration moved to "late registration" status; in October, there was a marathon. So since 2012 was to be the 31st year, I assumed it would be roughly the same.


But for some reason, the date was slow in coming.  Eventually, they updated to a 2012 marathon logo.  And then much later, they put up a little countdown calendar on the website, counting down the days until race day.  Well, what was supposed to be race day.

I don't know why they'd use a countdown calendar to a date that wasn't certain. And I'm not actually sure they did that, I think the date was certain. But either way, in early September, it was announced in the press that the marathon would not be going forward as planned.

In the end, they held the marathon on a few weeks' notice on the last weekend in November.  I felt a bit vindicated in looking at the results.  I'm glad the marathon didn't do well, since I was so unhappy with the last-minute date change.  I am petty that way.  Their numbers were way down -- they had about 6200 people run the marathon, while they had planned for a maximum registration of 12,000.  Usually it filled up and they had a waiting list.  In 2012, they didn't even deserve the 6200 people they had.  Of the field in 2012, there were about 800 women total, only 69 of whom were foreign (and about a dozen of them were Americans).  When looking at these statistics, it was a little heart-breaking to see the American women's times and think about what could have been if I'd run at or near my current PR pace... oh well!  At least we had a great trip, I didn't have to worry about having sore quads and falling into a squatty-potty, I didn't have to worry about bad air during the race, and I got to run in San Antonio, though that doesn't really count.  Can't complain about the trip though!