Should The Umstead Race Registration Have You Worried?

Registration opened this morning for the 17th Umstead 100 mile endurance run, and there’s actually a little bit of drama associated with it. First thing in the morning, someone had posted to the ultra list that was actually two registration links on Active.com. One was the official link that you can get to from the website and it was not live, because the registration didn’t open noon eastern. But the other link was live and people started registering on it, eventhough it seemed a little bit dodgy. And my thinking was, I probably didn’t want to make use of that ’cause registration opened at noon. So obviously the race director weren’t planning on that link being there. So even if was something innocent, it’s not something that should have been used. But some people didn’t know that and were registering anyway.

The bigger concern that I had though was whether it was safe to use that link, because it seemed to me that it might be somebody trying to scam the system and see if they can get the people to get their money to a fake race link, and then they’ll show up on race day and they won’t be registered for the race, and there won’t be anything that they can do.

With stolen identities and all these other stuff that’s been going on lately, there’s got to be a way to funnel that out. That’s kind of what I was worried about and why I wouldn’t have used it, but some people just didn’t know or didn’t care that it wasn’t the official registration link. So once the race came around to actually opening registration, the race directors have gotten that other link shutdown as quick as they could, but there is still 29 people who registered for the race. And then the race directors decided to allow them to stay in.

Now their gonna get a lot of flak whether they kick those people out, or whether they allow them to stay in. So their decision was for those 29 was it was an innocent mistake, and as long as they get the additional registration information that they need to, they’re gonna get tobe in on the race. But I think second guessing from my position, I’d probably wouldn’t have let those people in. Just because the race does fill up so fast. it only took a few minutes last year and about the same amount of time this year, for the online registrations to fill up. They only have so many people that are allowed to be in the park for the permit that they were able to get. So I probably would have said If you tried getting around the rules, even if you didn’t do it intentionally, you would have had to re-register in order to get in the normal way. And then I would have just Active refund the money.

My concern though is whether Active is gonna do anything to prevent this sort of thing from happening again, because what happens if it’s not a race that has so much attention on it from so many hundreds of people at the one time, and somebody is able to get a payment out of Active that is not affiliated with the race at all. It seems like a danger and hopefully there will be something that they can put in place to take care of that before this happens again.

So were you one of the people who tried to get in Umstead this morning? And if you did, did you try using the real link or did you use the secondary confirmation? If not, have you ever considered running a hundred miler?

For myself, I had the form filled out but I decided not to hit submit and take up somebody’s spot. Since I wasn’t sold that this was the race that I wanted to do as my first hundred miler. Instead I’ve decided to join Hasher Rick at the New Jersey 100 in March, which is a couple of weeks before Umstead. So if you couldn’t get into Umstead, I’d recommend going to the New Jersey 100 instead and say Hi.