Steamtown Update July 23, 2012

Greetings runners!

Just some quick housekeeping items and a word about race day beverages...

Refund if you Withdraw - It has come to our attention that in your torried zeal to subject yourself to unimaginable pain, many of you registered which such great speed that you failed to notice the big red letters on our home page, or the paragraph on our entry form, that dealt with withdrawing from Steamtown.

Here is the actual verbage as ripped by me only moments ago from our online entry form:

IMPORTANT: Registration closes when we receive our 3,000th entry. We will not have a wait list and runners who register but are unable to run will not be allowed to carry forward their entry fee to 2013. Please register only if you are committed to participating in this event. Although the vast majority of marathons do not offer any refunds to runners who register but are unable to run, The Steamtown Marathon will give you a $25 refund if you officially withdraw NO LATER THAN 11:59 p.m. EST on September 7, 2012. The $25 will be applied to the credit card you used to enter the race. To request this partial refund, you MUST send an e-mail to racecommittee@hotmail.com NO LATER than September 7. 2012. Your e-mail must state clearly that you are withdrawing and indicate that you are requesting the $25 refund. The Steamtown Marathon will ask the Active.com Client Support Team to apply the refund to your credit card.

We are receiving quite a few e-mails from runners asking if they can carry forward their entry fee to 2013. Unfortunately, after 16 years, we ended our carry forward policy after last year's race. The reason is that we had a 30% no-show rate each of the last two Steamtowns. Such a high no show rate made it very difficult to plan the race logistics (in prior years, before we started to sell out, our no show rate was consistently in the 14% to 18% range). Please spread the word about our new policy and remind fellow competitors that they must notify us of their intent to withdraw by September 7 in order to receive the partial refund.

Am I Registered? - We are receiving a good number of e-mails from alarmed Steamtown entrants saying that they checked the list of official registrants on Active.com and could not find their names. First, if you have received this e-mail you are officially registered! Second, we have learned from speaking with Active.com that if someone else registered you, and then you check to see if you are registered, you won't find your name. That of course is because you don't really exist.

No! It's because of some online privacy issue that's kind of like HIPA for runners. We have told Active.com that this policy is a bummer and it is causing our runners great grief. They have told us that they talked about us at a really important and very big meeting where they couldn't even eat snacks and now their I.T. people are looking into the situation. So, if you are reading this e-mail, odds are that you really do exist and you are officially registered for Steamtown.

Race Day Beverages - We will have 13 aid stations along the course. Click here to see where they will be: http://www.steamtownmarathon.com/4.html. Each aid station will have water and lemon lime All Sport.

We've used lemon lime All Sport the past two years and the drink received solid reviews by our competitors. Prior to deciding to use All Sport, our race committee did a taste test of the product. The results were unanimous. It had a nice bouquet and it tasted like chicken. No! It tasted like a good tasting sports drink! Many thanks to Canada Dry Royal Crown and All Sport for again making it financially possible for us to provide the drink on our course.

Unfortunately, the drink is not available in retail stores in all areas. Bulk quantities are available for purchase but from what I understand the only amounts available for purchase are very voluminous.

All for now. Back to you with more info in a few weeks.

Sincerely,

Jim "I drink All Sport therefore I am" Cummings Asst. Race Director

Thanks for clearing those issues up for us kayjer!