Houston We Have A Problem

Day 2 into the Chevron Houston Marathon/Aramco Half Marathon announcement that they are going to a lottery system for the 2011 race and the locals are still buzzing.  I personally have very little history with the Houston race but it seems like every year they seem to come up with some bonehead decision to top the prior year's bonehead decision. 

From where I stand, it seems like the race has a real identity problem.  Last year was the first year that the race put separate caps on the half and full marathons.  The caps were at 11,000 each.  Sounds reasonable so far, right?  The bonehead factor with that was that they allowed transfers between events even after the cap was met for one of the races.  So what happened last year, people wanting to run the half marathon after the half reached its cap of 11,000 simply signed up for the full and then paid the $10 administrative fee to switch from the full to the half.  Every other race that I've seen with separate race caps do not allow transfers once an event has reached its capacity.  I somewhat thought this was merely an oversight by the race last year; however, with the same caps in place this year and the same transfers between events allowed, it seems clear that Houston doesn't really want to cap the half at 11,000.  With that said, I don't know if they don't think the marathon would hit the 11,000 mark on its own.  Otherwise, I don't see why they would just not allow switching between events, similiar to how they experimented with allowing race transfers between individuals but discontinued that process.

Another solution to Houston's filling so fast would be to eliminate the half marathon.  That is kind of hard to do this year as the race is once again the mens and womens US Half Marathon championship.  It would be difficult to have a 1/2 championship without an actual 1/2 event.  Once again, there is an identity crisis.

I initially planned on running 2011 Houston 1/2 marathon as most of my running group participates in the event every year.  When the lottery was announced, my initial thought was should I sign up for the full lottery and have better odds of getting accepted versus the half lottery which one would expect would have far more entrants.  Upon further review, I think I'll just sit Houston out again this year.  Thanks Houston for keeping things interesting!