Athletepath
The other day a friend went zipping past my house setting what looked to be a pretty good pace and he ran down my gravel, pot hole stricken street and away he went around the corner and up the hill. When I ran into him later in the weekend he said that he was just on a 10 mile run in preparation for the annual Hood to Coast Relay.
It turns out that a number of friends and acquaintances are going to be participating in the relay, either as runners or as team volunteers. So how do you follow people in a two day race when the roads are closed and it is hard to tell team times?
Well one startup company, Athletepath, is going to give it a shot with a product that is just now emerging from beta. The product uses social media to keep followers of atheletes informed on their progress and enables the athletes to fill in their followers about what is going on with them.
The company, started by Wieden + Kennedy’s Portland Incubator Experiment (PIE) that selected the company last year as one of nine companies to get funding, out of 275 applicants. The founders of Athletepath include CEO David Embree, Christian Reed as front-end developer and Junichi Furukawa as lead technical developer. A look at their athletic resume shows triatheletes, cyclists, soccer player and skier, among other outdoor activities that they and others on the team participate in.
The free app can be used with any browser and uses official race timer information to keep racers and their followers up to date on their progress. It can use email, text or post to Twitter results when someone crosses the finish line that you are following.
The goal of the program is more than just a tool to inform fans of ongoing results. It also informs athletes of upcoming events in which they may be interested in participating.
Hood to Coast Relay
About Hood to Coast
The race is an interesting event that takes place over the course of two days and runs, as its name implies, from Timberline Lodge on Mt. Hood east of Portland, down the hill and onwards to the ocean, finishing leg 36 in Seaside the following day.
The starting altitude of the race is over 6,000 feet above sea level and each leg is anywhere from 3.52 miles to 8.09 miles in length. There is also a start in Portland for teams that are doing the walking version of the race as well.
It is a pretty big event and this year it expects to have 1,050 teams, each with a maximum of 12 runners and a minimum of eight that will take on the challenge of running the entire 199 mile course over the two days of August 24 & 25th. This is the 31st running of the event and the first year it had eight teams.
While it might seem that this could be a receipt for confusion as some teams come, like at events such as Bay to Breakers, just for the fun of it and with no real expectations of finishing the race, the race has a rather strict approach and gets times from previous races to judge the quality of teams. It also looks at finished times and uses that for seeding teams. There are a series of penalties for a variety of infractions ranging from 30 minutes to 60 minutes to disqualifications.
Now I can tell my friends I was there watching and citing their team times as proof, and as long as they are unaware of the app I can reap free beers for being such a supportive friend! A win for everybody in my book.
