This past weekend race organizers of the Zions Bank Ogden Marathon offered the full RaceJoy experience to participants and spectators. This race attracts people from around the globe with its beautiful mountainous and fast course. More than 5,000 participants and spectators used RaceJoy for the Ogden Marathon, Half Marathon and 5K. Spectators from 46 states tracked runners and showed their support (the other four States must have been at the race site 🙂 ).
The full marathon starts in a dead cell zone so the race is scored on gun time vs. chip time. This was a bit tricky for RaceJoy, so we added a no cell zone overlay on the map to help communicate this with people using the app. Runners using RaceJoy’s GPS tracking turned their tracking on around mile 5, where the cell conditions improved. Though, we did have a rebel, Nicholas, show up in the no cell zone! There were more than 400 runners tracked using RaceJoy’s GPS tracking at the half and full courses and more than 2,500 cheers were sent.
It was a rainy day for the Ogden Marathon participants and supporting fans were grateful to have RaceJoy so they could know when to come out and cheer on their runner. As one runner/spectator emailed:
“Fantastic app!
This app was a huge benefit today. I ran the half and had friends in the full. I could stay out of the rain and knew just when to go back out and watch them finish!
Thank you!”
Race organizers opted to be a Featured Event in RaceJoy — where we integrate with the official race timing services to provide race-timed Progress Alerts and immediate Results. Timing services were provided by Race Central, who is one of the best in the business and are great to work with. They gave us a direct stream to their results data and we were able to issue out more than 52,000 progress alerts as individual and relay team participants crossed timing points on the course. Note: Participants can go to the Buzz area of RaceJoy at any time to look at their past alerts.
Another cool thing we did for the Ogden Marathon is integrate with MarathonFoto so that finishers could go in and see their personal photos from their Results page in RaceJoy. They just click on the MarathonFoto banner and voila!
Special thanks to MarathonFOTO for their collaboration and awesome photos!
It takes a lot of work to bring all the technologies together, but it makes it all worthwhile when we get comments like this one from supporting spectators. This is why we created RaceJoy!
“Loved your app! Our daughter lives in Utah and we live in Indiana. We were able to encourage her and watch her results live. Your app. helped make us feel we were cheering her on the sidelines hundreds of miles away! Thanks!”
Thank you, to all who used RaceJoy at the Zions Bank Ogden Marathon. And a special thank you to the race organizers who are clearly dedicated to offering a premium race experience.
More about RaceJoy:
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
