
Entry for the 2010 Virgin London Marathon ballot began at 9 am on Monday. I made sure I was awake and the laptop fired up by 8:30. I wanted to make sure my ballot was in asap since I didn’t know how soon the ballot would fill up. I also wanted to get it out of the way so I could get on with the rest of my day.
Yeah, that would have been nice.
Obviously I was not the only one with this genius plan. To say the website was slow is an understatement. Hell, just trying to get on the website was the problem. The refresh button on my web browser and I became well acquainted with one another. Slowly, but steadily I was making my way through the entry process. My dedication was so strong I even brought my laptop with me into the bathroom for my potty breaks and into the kitchen for meals. Yes, that’s meals, the plural. Thankfully we have wireless at the house or that could have been really awkward.
Moving on...
During this time, I also managed to get some work done—Italian study, organizing my to-do lists, etc. A couple of times I even fired off emails to a friend to let her know why I wasn’t in the office. She wrote back wondering if she should try to enter the ballot as well. I replied with a ‘Hell yes!’ but with a warning about how cruddy the site was being because of the demand. She wrote back saying she probably shouldn’t do it, because she should be focusing on finishing her dissertation so no time for training. Eh, it’s not stopping me any.
At the 5 hour 38 minute mark, when I was two clicks away from finishing my ballot entry, the entire website shut down and displayed this message:
‘Due to unprecedented demand for marathon places, this website is currently unavailable. Please try again later today or tomorrow.’
You’ve got to be f*cking kidding me. I wasted all that time to just about get to the end of the process and the whole thing shuts down?!? Bloody hell! The kicker was yet to come though. Immediately I emailed my friend to let her know the sitch, but see she has already written me. Her email said this:
‘It took me an hour, but I got in the ballot!’
I cannot express to you the amount of rage I had coursing through my body at that moment. One measly f*cking hour and she’s in the ballot. Five and a half hours for me and bupkis. What. The. F*ck.
I then packed up my gear, left the house and headed to the department. As per my luck for the day, the once clear skies decided to not only dump buckets of rain on my head for the jaunty six block walk, it also threw in some hail as well. I entered the door of the department a sopping wet, angry mess, my jeans plastered to my legs all the way to the tops of my thighs. And it was all capped off with a humidified afro atop my head. (I was wearing my hooded rain jacket, hence the hair-do.)
I proceeded to spend the next three and a half hours there trying to get some work done but also checking the website every few minutes to see if it was back up again. Nada. Finally, I caved and left, grabbing some not too healthy chinese food before heading home.
I bitched with the flatmates about the shitey-ness of my day and finally headed up to my room for one last go before hitting the sack.
So finally, at 10:20 pm that evening, I completed and submitted my ballot successfully for the London Marathon. And it only took me 13 hours and 20 minutes. I could run three marathons in that time. Most of you could run four or more.
I better f*cking get in.
The truly sad part for me though? The ballot isn’t full yet and the website is working perfectly today. I could have saved myself all that trouble and just waited. But as you can see, patience is not one of my virtues. More’s the pity.
So there. Whether it was karma or just plain bad luck, that was the shittiest Monday I’ve had in a long while. Whatever the reason I was cursed with that day, I hope my slate has been wiped clean now. Otherwise, I’m going to have to kill someone. And Richard Branson, you’d be target #1. I’ve given you fair warning.
Happy hump day, everyone.