Starting on Friday, May 1 and running through Saturday, May 2, we had participants in the American Odyssey Ultra Relay race use RaceJoy’s live GPS tracking. This is a 200-mile, 36-hour relay race that travels from Gettysburg to Washington, DC. The race offers an “Odyssey” travel through history and defines Odyssey as:
“…a long series of wanderings or adventures, especially when filled with notable experiences and hardships…”
The event’s race director reached out to us to see about using RaceJoy for tracking and we loaded in the course map with the various legs of this historic odyssey event. 120 race participants had their phones tracked during the weekend and 60 additional spectators tracking them live on the course. Participants and spectators sent 450 audio cheer clips in RaceJoy, sustaining the relay runners through 36 hours of running.
Race directors of Ultra events report a consistent issue with people getting lost. The participants can get in a kind of mindless running state, some even miss turns. This can turn into a big problem and can be pretty scary for the runner – especially at night. With RaceJoy, the runner can quickly view themselves in relation to the course using either the tracking screen or the MeetUp feature and quickly get back on track. And others can see right where the runner is and call them when seeing they are off course.
What was interesting about this, was seeing the teams use tracking to help coordinate and plan the run. We saw that most kept their tracking on even went they weren’t running the current leg. And, it went both ways; not only did the team track the runner on the current leg, but the runners could see where their teammates were at any time. We are seeing a lot of interest from relay teams for RaceJoy and for all types of race events.
If you are a race organizer and would like to get your race added to RaceJoy, simply enable RaceJoy in the RunSignUp GO platform and provide your course map electronically (KML, GPX or link to map). You can also email this to addrace@racejoy.com. We require a minimum of two weeks to load and will send you notice and promotion toolkit once it is active. This is free to the event and the participant and spectator pay a 99 cents per race upgrade fee. Buyout options are available for race organizers to offer RaceJoy for free. For more information on the buyout option, please see our PhoneTrak Pricing Flyer.
RaceJoy key features:
Live phone tracking
Audio cheer sending
Near Me Proximity alerts
MeetUp mapping feature
Now Available! GPS Progress Alerts
