A few weeks ago I ran the TC 1 Mile race in Minneapolis which is hosted by the Twin Cities Marathon as part of their annual series of events.  Part of the deal is that every 1 mile runner is put into a drawing for a guaranteed TC 10 mile entry.

You see the 10 mile race takes place on the same morning of the marathon, but has a lottery entry system which caps at around 6,000 entrants.  To encourage runners to compete in  the 1 mile and the 10 mile they offer 1,000 guaranteed entries to the 10 mile race drawn at random from the 1 mile finishers.  This year only about 2,300 runners finished the 1 mile race which means almost 50% of the field received entry into the 10 mile.  Including me.

This was the e-mail I received on May 12:

Congratulations on being one of the 1,000 randomly drawn finishers to receive a guaranteed entry to the Medtronic TC 10 Mile! We’d like to offer a special ‘thank you’ for joining us on a beautiful May 7th evening for a great downtown race, and hope the excitement of two national championship races and a sub-four minute mile is still high.

Sadly, all TC Marathon, Inc entries are non-transferable, including this guarenteed entry.  Don’t worry, even with this entry you still get to pay the full $60 plus processing fees to race.

Even with this “great prize” I decided to get an e-mail that said this:

Congratulations! You are officially registered for the 28th annual Medtronic Twin Cities Marathon on October 4, 2009.

So I have officially registered for the 2009 Twin Cities Marathon, which is currently just over 75% full (pdf).

[tags] Twin Cities, Marathon, Twin Cities Marathon, 1 Mile, 10 Mile [/tags]