There is a limit of 50,000 runners for this race, and the first 25,000 to register get a guaranteed spot. After these spots are filled, anyone registering on the website is entered into a lottery. At the end of the registration period, another 25,000 runners are chosen randomly from these registrants. The notifications were supposed to go out by email last week.
As a grad student, I've gone through this kind of thing a lot: these days, to submit a paper for publication in a conference or journal, you usually send the thing away electronically and then wait for weeks or months while someone decides whether or not the work is appropriate for their venue.
If you end up pulling one or more all-nighters trying to finish your draft, it's easy to put the waiting process out of your mind for a while: for the first 24 hours you're asleep. But after some time you start thinking about and looking for the verdict. The closer it gets to the time when you expect an answer, the more you think and the more you look.
Finally you get an email, either with good news ("We are pleased to inform you...") or with bad news ("We regret to inform you...").
With all of that in the back of my mind, this past Friday I saw this in my inbox:
| Sender | Subject |
| tokyomarathon2008 | TOKYO MARATHON 2008 |
After 6 years of graduate school I have a conditioned response to messages like these. My heart races as I try to simultaneously click and not-click on the email. Mentally, I enter a multiple-universes kind of state where I can peek into the future and see a "Congratulations!", while another future-me is reading the disheartening words "many fine applicants". It's a confusing time.
Anyway what I actually saw was this:
Dear Sir or Madam
Congratulations! You have been selected to run the 2008 Tokyo marathon.
So now, putting all of my imagined value-judgements aside (this was a lottery, after all, and not an application): is this good news or bad news?
In 2002, I ran the Pittsburgh Marathon, which unfortunately was suspended in 2004 and hasn't come back. Since then I've run here and there, but lately I've only been running 10 miles per week, at most.
I'm also very busy with work right now. Hal Higdon does not recommend that runners train for the marathon while "studying for a law exam or planning a wedding". Does "finishing a Ph.D." also count? Probably.
So maybe this is not the best time for the marathon. On one hand, this is an opportunity for me to do something uniquely Tokyo, while I'm here. On the other, there are many fun and beautiful marathons to be run around the world, maybe next year.
By the 26th of this month, I have to email the marathon organizers to tell them whether I'll be accepting my spot. I'm thinking of something like this:
Dear Sir or Madam,
Thank you for your offer, unfortunately my quota for exciting but stressful and ultimately unrealistic goals has been reached for this semester/year/life. There were many fine applicants and believe me I took on more of them than I could possibly accomplish with any grace...
Or who knows, maybe like this:
Dear Sir or Madam,
I am pleased to inform you that I will be running in the marathon this Spring. I look forward to the physical exhaustion as a way to balance and hopefully manage the intellectual stresses that come with finishing a doctoral thesis. It also seems like a golden opportunity for me to participate in Tokyo cultural life without having to use any of my unique and embarrassing pronunciations of Japanese words...
