Cyclocross Nationals registration opened last night at 11:01 pm central, or did it?
I've become a veteran of these set the alarm, go to sleep, & wake up in time to hammer out my online registration scenarios. Since CX is heavy on the start is critical end of the spectrum these order of registration sign ups are well...critical. I have actually become extremely proficient (fast) at this process & have usually "won" the race to get in.
10:20 pm - I wake up from being asleep for about 1.5 hours even before the 2 phone alarms I have set, actually three alarms, my wife set hers for 10:30 for me & I had 2 set on mine for 10:30 & 10:35 (mine is a new phone, I didn't want to mess it up). All those alarms for naught, all I did was lay there for a few minutes until they went off & I turned them off.
10:40 pm - I'm at my post. Logged in & ready, approximately 21 minutes to go.
10:50 pm - I hit refresh & the reload slows to a crawl...uh oh! The page will not reload, server overload?
11:0-something pm - I text TP in KC, problems on my end, u? Response, same problem down here, can't get in! Well son-of-a...Another text to TP & his last response..."its going to be a long night".
I'll condense the next couple of hours, I sat here at my computer hitting the refresh button while surfing other perfectly working sites on other tabs. I visited SBO's facebook site to view comments by other frustrated/thwarted registrants. The comments ranged from mildly confused to pissed off. On twitter I found this amusing link: .
unsure about this font change...
1:05 am - the site pops up all of a sudden, I quickly log in, manage to get to the pick your category page & wham...stalled out again. Damn! I thought my misery was coming to an end. In those few minutes it was sort of working I noticed a few people had managed to register. Hmmmm? I can only speculate...
1:55 am - I'm in this for the long haul. I don't have to work tomorrow & we are only racing on Sunday this week so I've got all day tomorrow to recover. Maybe not the best idea but I was pretty tired so I broke out the single serve french press & fired up a strong single of some freshly roasted Guatamalan Huehuetenango.
2:19 am - still tapping refresh intermittantly & VOILA! The page refreshes to the "pick your category page". Not only am I in but I'm right where I need to be! Bam, select my category. Bam, proceed to checkout, Bam, log in super-fast (it had booted me somewhere along the line), Bam, speed glance at some racing age mumbo jumbo. Bam, authorize my credit card already on file &...I'm done.
2:20 am - 4 hours after my adventure began I had succesfully registered. I went back to the page to see how many had registered in my category & it showed one, a couple minutes later it showed 3. I believe I had managed to either be the first or at least one of the first few onboard in my age group.
Now the mysterious part begins behind the scenes. As I understand it, Cat 1 will be lined up by order of registration first then Cat 2's & so on. So at best I should be behind any Cat 1's & the top 10 or 8 or whatever they decide from last year. If it plays out that way I'll be happy...I did everything I can do on my end.
You're going to love this at 6:30 this morning I only counted 181 registered on the male side. It gets better, I just went to count again & add the women in also but I couldn't...the site is down again!
Ugh!
Later,
TK
UPDATE 7:56am - its up again but they took off the # of people registered in each category feature?
