Archive for March, 2011

I hadn’t received my AJC Peachtree Road Race confirmation email Monday morning before people started complaining in the comments section of last week’s blog post that they lost the lottery.
Race organizers confirm that expanding the race by 5,000 runners to 60,000 for 2011 left about 2,000 people who entered the lottery on the outside looking in.
Condolences to any shut-outs who had their heart set on running the Peachtree this year, especially anyone who has a long streak going of under ten years. (If you were shut out and have at least ten Peachtrees under your belt, you can appeal to the Atlanta Track Club and ask for a dispensation).
One good thing about the lottery – it did apparently eliminate the technical glitches from past years when everyone tried to access the online sign up at the same instant. This year the online system worked well based on everything I’ve heard.
In my slacker days – the two decades before last year at this time – I put my running …

Continue reading Lottery is Settled, When Does Your Training Begin? »

One might have thought the introduction of a wave system in the 2010 AJC Peachtree Road Race would calm the conflicts between its runners and walkers. It at least was better than the former mostly random assignment of the majority of entries into nine larger groups, right?
For some, the answer is apparently: wrong.
I expected it might stir the pot when I wrote last week about how some runners who train hard for the Peachtree feel about walkers, who they see as a roadblock to a fast time.
Never mind last year’s Independence Day “race” was over before all but a small portion of the 55,000 Peachtree participants had cleared the giant blow up Uncle Sam in Buckhead. I’ve looked at the times for the first several groups from last year and I can’t imagine the road was clogged with walkers mixed in with people running from the D wave and higher.
I can confirm if you start further back and you want to run under an hour, you will be doing a lot of cutting and dodging. In my …

Continue reading Will tortoise and hare make nice with 2011 wave system? »

And so it begins. March 15th is the day everything changes for the AJC Peachtree Road Race. I could reach for an easy Ides of March Shakespeare quip. But given the tone of recent blog comments from runners upset about the new random system for allocating bibs to runners on Peachtree this July 4th, a literary reference to Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” seems more appropriate.

Many commenters on this earlier blog worried they will be shut out of the road race bib lottery, held from March 15th through the 24th. A recurring theme is the thousands of people who walk the course every year will be responsible for displacing them. If the runners didn’t call for public stoning, as in Jackson’s short story, they at least expressed a level of contempt for people who walk the course I didn’t realize existed.
For example, from DS: “DO NOT LIKE! I will be EXTREMELY P**SED if I don’t get in and some STUPID WALKER does.”
I set a goal last year of running the race under an …

Continue reading Is it really runners versus walkers in the Peachtree numbers game? »