The Race Before "The Race"

The 2012 Park City Point to Point SOLD OUT 350 spots in less than 4 minutes!


I have to admit that I was a little nervous yesterday as the 7 PM deadline approached. I had two reasons to be nervous:

A) I really wanted to race the 2012 PCPP and I had to register just like everyone else.

B) My site, Athlete360, was hosting the registration and I really wanted things to go smoothly.

I called my partner Don, our Lead Developer, earlier in the day and asked if we needed to do anything special to prepare for the onslaught that was sure to occur at 7 PM. He calmly said, "If everything is working properly now, I wouldn't touch anything." I was hoping he would say "Yeah, we will turn on the turbo" or something to that effect.

We actually bought a new kick-ass server last year just before this event in order to ensure that we could handle the load. That sever handled last year's 6 minute PCPP sellout and has been a rock star ever since so there was no reason to think that it wouldn't handle the pressure this year. I was still a little nervous. We are young company and a "meltdown" during a high profile registration would totally suck. I sincerely appreciate that the Park City Point to Point gave us, Athlete360, a "shot at the title" and I absolutely wanted to deliver. I am stoked that we did.

A little before 7 PM I sat down in front of two computers. One computer had Athlete360's PCPP page loaded for registration. The other computer had Facebook, Twitter, and another Athlete360 PCPP page for monitoring purposes. Like hundreds of other folks, I hit refresh at 7 PM and when the little green "Add To Cart" button appeared I went into "panicked racer" mode. I think I mis-typed my credit card number two or three times and I thought I had blown my chance but I got in. Phew! This was real world system testing at its finest. I immediately jumped over to the second computer and began to monitor the madness and shoot out a few updates to the PCPP main man, Jay Burke via Facebook Chat. I watched in amazement as the number of slots remaining went from 350 to 220 to 40 to None Remaining in under 4 minutes. Meanwhile, a few of my homies shot me notes that they were in as well so it looks like a good crew from Jackson/Teton Valley is heading to the PCPP again in 2012.