Twin Cities Marathon Website Lacks, But Live Tracking Rocks
I was hoping to add the Twin Cities Marathon website to the Websota gallery last week to tie in with the marathon happening last Sunday (October 5th, 2008), but web design wise it’s nothing notable. I would think a marathon touting itself as “The Most Beautiful Urban Marathon in America” would find some photography of the course to support that claim. How about Minnesota fall colors or some fall design elements? How about any of the course along the Minneapolis Lakes area? Nothing.
I did however jump on the website Sunday morning to track a few friends and neighbors making the 26.2 mile run on Sunday and was pleasantly surprised at the live race tracking features. The TC Marathon site was using live race tracking from Mtrack. I have tracked plenty of marathon runners online and just received the standard times and split updates, but Mtrack has integrated Google maps to this providing both location and time tracking. Based on the timing of the runner at specific distance points, they also can estimate the progress of the runner. Here is a screen shot below from Sunday.
This mapping and estimated progress feature even allowed me to help my neighbors family find her on the race course as I called them to give them time splits and location. What a cool feature.
The tracking tool also has some marketing built into as well. In the lower right corner there is the ability to show the Caribou Coffee locations along the race spectator course. I’m sure the race promoters could do this with any sponsor they’d like. Here is the race course map with that feature enabled:
Very cool and it looks like form the Mtrack website that this service might be a Minnesota company since the only 2 races they offer this on is Grandmas (Duluth) and the Twin Cities Marathon. Maybe next year the website will get a face lift.
October 6th, 2008 at 3:06 pm
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