138,000 Progress Alerts Issued!
As one of the first marathons to ever offer RaceJoy, the 2017 Mercy Health Glass City Marathon delivered a live race day experience for those at the race site and for remote spectators. RaceJoy was a significant component of this along with the event’s live streaming and interviews on race day. And clearly people embraced the technology with 138,000 progress alerts being issued through RaceJoy – breaking the record for most alerts at a single race.
The Glass City Marathon likes to bring new race day experiences and this year race organizers implemented a new live race day page on the Glass City Marathon website. This offered quick access to the RaceJoy app, a live leaderboard, which provided instant official results information, and a live streaming video of the race. This was really awesome since it wasn’t just a static streaming of the finish line. It also included the local news anchor from BCSN The Blade covering the race day and performing live interviews with participants. It also included a split screen where you could watch finishers come in while seeing what was going on at other areas of the finishing area in the Glass Bowl. In addition, for those participants that setup their profile for auto tweeting of progress, their alerts showed in the twitter live streaming (#RunGlassCity) shown on the live race page.
With the RaceJoy app, Glass City Marathon also provided participants and spectators with live race day features like continual progress updates, live phone tracking, cheer sending, and scored results within moments of crossing the finish line. This year, more than 7,000 people used RaceJoy at the Glass City Marathon!
The Glass City Marathon is one of the few races RaceJoy also offers Bib tag tracking along with RaceJoy’s industry first GPS-based progress updates. This meant that thousands of participants and spectators were receiving progress updates at every mile on the course. Updates included information like location, pace, and estimated finish time. Participants also had the option of posting their progress to their Facebook and Twitter walls. A record breaking number of alerts were sent out over the course of the Glass City Marathon weekend, with 138,000 progress alerts being issued!
One of the great things about Glass City Marathon offering both tracking in RaceJoy and the live streaming of the finish line is that supporting family and friends could track participants’ blue dot as it moved along the course in the app and then watch them live in the streaming video as they crossed the finish line. Most runners have a friend or family member that can’t make it to the race. So, this offered an easy way to support the participant remotely and share in the race experience whether at the race site, at home or in another country (we saw you Canadians and Brits tracking your runners!)
Supporting family and friends were also able to track runners live as they moved along the course by using RaceJoy’s GPS phone tracking feature.
Supporting friends and family sent close to 9,000 cheers to Glass City Marathon participants! Way to support the runners!
The Glass City Marathon takes place in our nation’s “Glass City”; Toledo, Ohio and is hosted by the Toledo Roadrunners Club. Northwest Ohio’s largest springtime event finishes in the Glass Bowl and the race organizers go all out to provide a special race experience. on. Thank you race organizers for including RaceJoy again this year, and congratulations finishers on a job well done!
Race Organizers: If you’d like to be on the forefront of race day technology, get your event loaded in RaceJoy by checking out our website for information or go to your RunSignup dashboard. Please note that we require a minimum two-week load time prior to the race start and an official course map in KML or GPX format.