Live marathon updates! April 24, 2008
Posted by regivizz Marathon, Race, Running
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For the first time, the OKC Memorial Marathon is providing LIVE updates online and to registered cell phones! Here’s the story from newsok.com:
Live marathon updates sent for the first time
By Blake Jackson
Staff Writer
Alison Cohen usually waits until mid-afternoon on Sunday to make the call.
For the past six years, her brother Adam has run the Oklahoma City Memorial Marathon. And for the past six years, she has dialed long-distance from her home in Cambridge, Mass., to find out how he finished.
“It can be really nerve-racking actually,” said Alison Cohen, a marathoner herself. “There’s always a piece of you that wants to be out there running. Normally, I have to go find out how he did an hour or two after (he runs).”
This year, Adam’s results are coming to her in real time.
And a Tulsa-based company is bringing them.
For the first time in the Oklahoma City Memorial Marathon’s eight-year history, live results and updates will be available online and via cell phone alerts during the race.
“It works like a Pikepass, only it’s miniaturized,” said Tim Dreiling, owner of Fleet Feet Sports and Fleet Feet Timing, the company charged to keep up with 16,000-plus runners Sunday morning. “It’s RFID (radio frequency identification) technology. They use it in all types of timing and tracking systems.”
Each runner is outfitted with a tiny microprocessor housed in plastic. The “ChampionChip” is attached to the shoe of single marathon runners with a zip-tie. Relay teams will be equipped with transferable anklets.
Radio receivers built into FieldTurf mats at five separate course check points activate as the runners pass through, sending an individual signal back to the results tent near the finish line, where the results are funneled in mass to OKCmarathon.com and — for an added fee — cell phones.
The technology prevents cheating.
“It’s important to know that people have run the entire course,” said co-founder and marathon president Thomas Hill. “You have to cross that mat with the chip or we know you cut the course.”
It aids the medical crew.
“There’s a database updated in real-time at the medical tent,” Hill continued. “They can find out where people are on the course and if someone is taken into medical care out on the course they can communicate it that way.”
It streamlines dissemination of the final results.
“We can make minor adjustments and clean it up and have it turned around and on the Web site in less than a minute,” Dreiling said. “It’s real-time and it will be faster and more accurate than we’ve ever had.”
And it’s cheaper, too.
The Oklahoma City Memorial Marathon has implemented some form of “ChampionChip” technology each of its eight years. But out-sourcing the timing services to a company based in Georgia came at a high cost.
Hill says switching to Fleet Feet made sense from both a financial and communal standpoint.
“Because the marathon is about what happened here in Oklahoma City and the city and state’s response to that, we have tried very hard to utilize local companies to fill our needs,” Hill said. “(Fleet Feet Timing) is relatively new, but they’ve demonstrated in other races that they are extremely capable and have pushed the technology farther than a lot of other timing companies have.”
That push in the technology — the ability to follow runners live throughout the race with little or no delay — puts Oklahoma City in some very prestigious company.
Only the largest races in the world, like the Chicago, London, Boston, New York and Los Angeles marathons, have implemented the technology.
“It’s something that you would see at only a handful of the absolute top-notch marathons in the world,” said Adam Cohen, who lives in Norman but won’t be waiting for his sister’s call on Sunday. “In terms of races Oklahoma City’s size, you do not see this. This is a big, big plus for the marathon.”
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