Running in the Cold.

Lotteries: The Wave of the Future Chicago Marathon announced Last Thursday, the. The announcement ended a tense nine-day waiting period for interested athletes who were unable to register due to system troubles with the registration host company, Active.com.

“A lottery will allow for equal chance of entry for all who wish to register,” says Carey Pinkowski, race director for the Chicago Marathon. “Given the demand for the remaining 15,000 entries, it’s a system that enables us to collect those entries over a three-day period, rather than creating a situation where people are racing to complete their entry forms and whoever has the fastest internet connection gets in.”

A lottery also helps ease Chicago’s concern that reopening registration on a first-come, first-served basis might once again overwhelm the system in place.

“We wanted to ensure there was no chance that our participants would experience system errors again,” Pinkowski says. “Unfortunately, given the demand with an open registration, we do not have that guarantee from our provider.”

As Chicago now gears up for what it hopes will be a successful last-minute implementation of a lottery system, it bears examining not only what transpired but also why lottery systems are becoming more prevalent within the industry.

And why more big races are moving to lotteries
Registration for the Chicago Marathon opened at noon on February 19. Almost immediately, users began having issues. This happened for several reasons, says Eric McCue, general manager of sports at the Active Network.

“The first point is we ran registration on our older system,” he says. “The second point is we ran it at a point in time when we were upgrading the environment the application sits on. It was spread across two different environments. The combination of that fact with the very high demand caused some communication errors within the system and caused some slowness, which ultimately caused a poor customer experience.”

The demand McCue cites was unprecedented for Chicago. In 2011, the Chicago Marathon sold out in 31 days. Last year the field was set after six days. As word spread that the 2013 edition would sell out in record time once again, interested competitors took to their computers at a rate Active’s servers could not handle, given the handicaps mentioned above.

Those attempting to register during this first flurry often found themselves receiving error messages. This led to multiple entries and credit card billings, as consumers had no way of knowing whether their applications and entry fees had been processed by Active.

“At that point in time we said, ‘Hey, this isn’t working like it should,’” McCue says. “’It’s a bad customer experience. We need to stop.’”

DAA Industry Opt Out How to Break 4 Hours in the Marathon and the event director for the Cherry Blossom 10-Miler, expressed little surprise that a race registration site was forced offline due to technological troubles in the middle of an event signup.

“Nearly all of the mega races have had server crashes over the last 10 years,” he says. “I have always had the theory that it is not worthwhile for the online provider to set up a server structure robust enough to handle the tiny number of races that place that level of demand on their servers. You hear about server crashes when Bruce Springsteen tickets go on sale as well.”

If registering for the 2013 Chicago Marathon somehow equaled The Boss in terms of demand, it also represented the first time Active has had to fully suspend registration because of system errors. It is also something they believed they were fully equipped to handle, given the investments Active has made, placing their servers in new, third-party data centers and developing better applications.  

“Frankly, it’s the cost of being a technology company and operating at the scale we do,” McCue says. “So I wouldn’t tie [updating their software and hardware] directly back to a situation like this.”

A Half to Full Marathon Training Plan
Technology troubles are not the only reason many major road races have begun reexamining their approach to registration.

Health & Injuries Atlanta Journal-Constitution beginning the third weekend in March. Savvy local runners, however, knew that the early “Bulldog” edition of the paper arrived in stores around noon on Saturday. This allowed them to get their registration in the mail on Saturday, a not insignificant advantage against those waiting for their Sunday home delivery (and Monday mailing).

This practice ended when the Peachtree Road Race adopted online registration in 2009, but troubles persisted. High demand (the race caps at 60,000 runners each year) caused technical issues the first two years, and by 2011 the race knew it had to change the way it handled entries.

“We made the decision to switch to the lottery system in order to establish a fair and less frantic way for entrants to register for the event,” says Tracy Lott, director of marketing and communications for the Atlanta Track Club, which hosts the Peachtree Road Race. “Under the first-come, first-served online system that we had in 2009 and 2010, the event was filling faster each year. In 2010, online registration slots were filled in just over four and a half hours.”

Though there was some initial grumbling from consumers accustomed to registering in a certain manner, most Peachtree racers found the system to be pretty convenient and equitable.

“We have an eight-day lottery entry window, so entrants no longer have to panic if they can’t be by a computer the moment that registration for the event opens,” Lott says. “Moving to a lottery also helped eliminate errors and delays caused by high traffic volume to the registration site.”

All About 75 Hard
Lottery systems have continued to grow in popularity in recent years as demand for race entries has outpaced the slots made available. No matter how well-equipped they are, technology companies realize that spreading the registration load is to everyone’s benefit. Lotteries are especially attractive for this reason.

“It’s certainly easier on the system,” McCue says, noting that Active has focused heavily on getting lottery-specific functionality built into their applications. “As a result [of this steadily increasing demand], more and more events, if not on their own then by us, are going to be encouraged to move in that direction.”

Lotteries also offer other benefits, McCue says. Race entries are determined in a fair, non-hurried manner that allows everyone an opportunity to be chosen. Races are also able to accurately assess their level of demand and try to meet the needs of their participants accordingly.

Stewart elected to move Cherry Blossom registration to a lottery system in 2010 after the race reached its 12,000-entrants cap in less than three hours. Knowing there would be a certain amount of blowback, he tried to accommodate traditions instilled in the race’s fabric, allowing whole groups to enter into the lottery together. At the Peachtree Road Race, Lott was sure to offer special consideration for his “streakers” – runners who had competed in the race for 10 or more consecutive years.

“We did a lot of research on other events in the industry that had successfully implemented lottery systems, and tried to anticipate the push-back we would get,” Lott says.

Pinkowski may soon be joining these race directors in reassessing the role a lottery might play. The Peachtree Example Chicago Crain’s Business that the first-come, first-served registration method “is the one thing we want to get away from.”

Such a move would not be without precedent. Of the three World Marathon Majors held in the United States, only Chicago still uses a first-come, first-served method of entry. The Boston Marathon has used a qualification system for decades to limit its field size, while the New York City Marathon has used a hybrid lottery/qualification system since 1999.