howies Dyfi Enduro entries open 31st January at 6pm

Many fingers will again be poised over keyboards in readiness for the opening of entries to this years howies Dyfi Enduro.  The event’s 1000 places sold out last year in under 2 minutes and with so much positive feedback from riders and recent good publicity we are anticipating a similar rush for spaces as we saw last year.

Back in 2014, the incredible surge of interest for early places took us by surprise. With so many riders trying to access the entry site at one time the load was so great that our server went down for several minutes leading to some rather tense moments for us and those trying to find a place.  Last year we increased capacity and this year we will be using a completely new entry process that should hopefully help things run even smoother.

We are warning riders to be prepared to see some changes, this year when you click the entry link you will find completely different entry pages, those of our new entry and timing partner stuweb.co.uk but you will need all the same entry information that was required before and of course, you can still register up to 5 participants via a single visit.

It’s always difficult for us to anticipate the level of demand on our server, even though we put a lot of computing muscle behind the system we can still find that access is slowed. The advice we pass on from our web administrators is to be patient, if you are part way through your entry process and the browser appears very slow it’s best to bear with it, clicking back or refresh may cause your browser to drop the entry process and put you right back to square one.

The main thing is not to get too frustrated. Even if you don’t manage to secure an entry on the date that might not be the end of the story.  Every year there are always a good amount of people who don’t make it to the event due to injury or other commitments. We tell people to post information of available places to our facebook page so this is usually the best place to look.  Most riders who are determined usually manage to find a passed on entry, you just need to persevere  and keep a watchful eye on social media.

The entry fee for the event this year will be £30 plus a small additional booking fee.  The ticket price includes entry to the event and camping in the event field for the weekend.  You can again order your howies organic cotton event T at a price of £25 for collection at the event.

Feedback from the 2015 event showed us very clearly that despite the need to be ready, poised at your PC at 6pm on 31st January and the potential frustrations associated with slowed access to our entry site, people are still unanimously in favour of this way of allocating places rather than the registered interest lottery style systems that many other popular events use.

So you can again count on a few tense minutes for us when the event opens this year but for many it seems, this is part of the excitement of the Dyfi.