I have come to the conclusion that the more technology allows you to do, the more you are going to expect from it. The New York City Marathon was run last night our time, I have a mate who is over there to run it and wanted to see how well he did. Now the New York Marathon attracts about 40,000 runners each year so it's a pretty major event and, as such, it is pretty well organised. On their web site the organisers have an Athlete Tracker which allows you to follow the progress of runners as they run across timing mats every 5km and their timing chips are recorded. So, I could see how my mate was progressing every half hour or so and see that his second 5km was a bit quicker than his first 5km (probably due to congestion at the start) but he started to slow a bit in the final 10-12km as he began to fatigue. From an armchair spectator's point of view this is fantastic and if the New York Marathon can do this then why not everyone else?
I did the Gold Coast Half Ironman triathlon a few weeks ago and friends of mine who were at home on their computers knew what time I did before I even knew. So I was a little disappointed that I couldn't follow the progress of a couple of other mates who did the Port Macquarie Half Ironman triathlon yesterday morning and I had to wait almost six hours before I found out how they went!
Even worse, my triathlon squad was competing at the Noosa triathlon yesterday as well but the results for that race would not be available online until 10am this morning because one of the major sponsors of the race is a newspaper who, in an attempt to stave off death by irrelevance, stipulated that they must be the first to publish the results in the hope that it would sell more newspapers. Some people I know were very unhappy about this, not because it was so long to wait but because there was no good reason to wait to find out how well they did.
Six hours, or even one day, does not sound like a long time to wait to get results from a race and that's because it's not. I have worked behind the scenes at various races collating times and results and I know that there is an awful lot of work that needs to go into the process, plus you need to make sure that it's right or people get very angry. But the fact is that people are now able to get almost instantaneous results for most events of this nature and so they have now come to expect it for all events.
Moving away from races for a moment but still on the topic of technological expectations I have to say that I am very impressed with the official web site for Movember this year. This is the third year that I have participated in Movember and, in the previous two years, the web site has provided me with text that I could copy and paste into an email to ask for donations and that has worked well for me. I would simply copy and paste the text into an email, add everyone in my address book and click send. But this year they have embraced social networking tools and made it a whole lot easier to reach people.
Now, there are links on the site to automatically paste the email wording into your default mail client but there are also links to post on Facebook or Twitter at the click of a button making it so much easier to reach a wider audience. In addition to this they have created fun Facebook applications such as a quiz to determine which mo you are (I am a Magnum, apparently) and an app to allow you to take a photo of your mo every day and create a mo-gress video showing the mo growing day by day. This beats the hell out of my weekly upload of a photo to Facebook which I was doing last year and also helps to keep the cause in everyone's consciousness as it pops up each day. In addition, the Movember site contains a list of all your Facebook friends who are participating in Movember making it easier to compete to see who can raise the most money.
With all of these new features though, they are going to have a hard job outdoing themselves next year because, of course, we will be expecting more. By the way, you can donate to the cause by going to http://au.movember.com/mospace/70371/.
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