I've been very fortunate to qualify for several big races in the past year; Western States, the Boston Marathon and Spartathlon. However, with the growing popularity of such races, the demand has now greatly outweighed the supply, which means that qualifying can now only guarantee, at best, a partial chance of gained entry.
The Spartathlon lottery for the 2016 event took place last week and I was not selected. I wasn't even close as I ended up 168th out of 172 on the waitlist. There were 21 slots, out of 390 total, reserved for US runners and nearly all 21 of the slots were filled by people who auto qualified. Automatic qualifiers had to run 20% faster than their qualifying standard to get in, so for me it would have required a sub 8 hour 100k or sub 18 hour 100 miler. It won't get any easier next year as the 100 mile auto qualifier will drop from the already challenging 18 hours to 16:48 for men. While my 8:53 100k from last year was a very strong time, the 20th fastest 100k in the US in 2015, it still missed the automatic entry by a lot. Without an automatic bid, my name, along with 12 others, was randomly selected for the US team's wait list.
That said, the lottery gods weren't very forgiving and I was selected 12th American, which means I am dead last for the US waiting list, and nearly dead last for all wait listed runners. In plain English, I basically have zero chance of running Spartathlon in six months. In the bizarre and highly unrealistic scenario I am moved off the wait list it will be far too close to the race date to make last minute travel arrangements, and of course, actually train. I am certainly not going to train my ass off for a 153 mile race I have 0.001% chance of getting into. On the bright side, I will have an extra ticket for the 2017 lottery, so if I don't auto qualify in 2017, my chances in the lottery will be a little better. The downside is that after 2017, I will need to re-qualify with either another 100k, or 100 miler.
As far as Western States, I don't really care that I didn't get selected for 2016. Qualifying for WS is probably the easiest out of the three big races I was aiming to get into, but it still required finishing a 100k or 100 miler on growing list of qualifying races that caters less and less to us East coast runners. Given that I've already completed the race, it's no longer very high on my bucket list, other than the fact I would love to run it when fully healthy and in shape. Considering I flirted with a sub 24 back in 2011 when I hadn't been running much and was 10 lbs overweight, my only real desire is to go back and see just how fast I can run it at an optimal level of health. Otherwise, Western States can wait.
The most recent race I qualified for was the Boston Marathon. Though I qualified two minutes under my standard, it also looks like I may miss the cut off for accepted entry. This was made even more frustrating by the fact that I recorded 26.53 miles on the course I qualified on. This was by no means an error in course measurement, but rather my inability to run the tangents more efficiently. I am typically used to getting 26.35 to 26.45 miles for most marathon course, even when not running all the tangents, so getting 26.53 miles may have cost me as much as an additional minute. Given that runners had to run 2:28 under their qualifying times to get into the 2016 Boston Marathon, it seems my 2:00 under, which could just have easily been 3:00 under, will likely miss the mark for 2017. If I want to run Boston in 2017 I will probably have to make another attempt at a BQ this spring and run faster than last fall. Personally, I'm not sure if it's worth the time and effort to pour into the training like I did last fall, only to potentially miss the cut-off again.
So, while I'm disappointed to put so much time and energy into qualifying for races I am not going to get to run, it's still just a first world problems level of disappointed. All the running and training has kept me relatively fit, when I otherwise might not be. I can also honestly say I never thought I would be doing the things I am doing athletically, on the verge of turning 35, that I couldn't come close to doing as a 20 year old college student.
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