You Win Some and You Win Some

This is an odd post, but bear with me.  Sometime in 2016, my boss was doing Invisalign and it seemed pretty neat, so when my dentist suggested I should see their in-house orthodontist for a free evaluation, I took them up on their offer.  The cost of Invisalign was a lot more than I was willing to spend for on my vanity, and even conventional metal braces were a magnitude more expensive than I wanted.

I shelved that project and put it out of my mind until 2018 when I saw an article on Techcrunch for Candid Co., which is essentially a mail order version of Invisalign for prices that were advertised for less than a third of what traditional metal braces cost.  I was intrigued and saw that there was a competing service called Smile Direct Club which offered basically the same thing for about the same cost.

Of course, because I went to their site, I started getting bombarded with ads, mostly for SDC.  Even at that price, it was more expensive than what I wanted to spend, so I just ignored the ads.  However, going into 2019 I changed my dental plan to one that would allow more flexibility for my daughter, who is now old enough to go to the dentist, and while more expensive, this plan covered 80% of the cost of orthodontia, which put this squarely in the "I should seriously consider this" category.

I talked with my wife about it and she said I should do it if it made me happy.  And so I decided I wanted to do it this year, but not so close to the holidays.  Fast forward to last week February 25, and I got what had to be the oddest promotion I have ever seen.  SDC sent me an email where if I used a specific promo code, I would be entered into a contest to win entry and a VIP pass to the Rock n' Roll DC marathon on March 9th, which if you do the math, was just 11 days after I got the promotional email.  I figured there wouldn't be too many people crazy enough to sign up for a race that they hadn't trained for at all in less than a month and that my chances of winning were pretty good.

I read the official rules and it indicated that winners would be notified on or about 3/1, so when the day came and passed, I figured I had not won, which was OK since as I mentioned I have not been following any sort of training plan.  I was more just disappointed that my seemingly rock solid logic in regards to my odds of winning were apparently incorrect.  I even went so far as to contact support to ask for a list of the winners because I found it so difficult to believe that I didn't win.

Today, March 5, four days before the race, I got an email saying that I won the contest and that I just need to go to the race expo to pick up my goodies.  It's pretty awesome, except that we just started sleep training my almost 9-month old son and he's making great progress.  Not to toot our own horns, but I think it's because we are being so consistent.  That in and of itself is not a problem, but the issue is that nap time happens to be exactly when the race is, which happens to be exactly when my daughter's swim class.  You see, I typically stay home during nap time to make sure the sleep training continues uninterrupted during swim lessons.

Now I'm scrambling to see if I can even go to this race.  And I'm just assuming that even though the prize was for entry into the marathon that I'll be able to drop down to the half marathon.  As a random aside, my first marathon was the Rock n' Roll DC marathon and the second half of it was ridiculously boring, much too boring to distract me from the fact that I froze throughout the race and bonked at mile 16.  I swore I would never do that race again, but, if I'm doing it for free, and I get VIP treatment, and it's only half of a marathon, if I can swing it, I will.

I guess if you see a Strava entry in a few days with a jaunt through Old DC, you'll know my scrambling was successful.

PS, if you want to sign up for SDC and want $100 off, you can use my referral link, which gets me a $25 gift card for Amazon.

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