A virtual marathon All was going to plan for the Rightmove Milton Keynes Marathon in the south of England until the coronavirus struck just two months before race day. Race director Andy Hully explains We had record year-to-date entries at the beginning of March 2020 of over 8000 runners. Then Covid came.. Our first thought was to postpone until autumn, but we hire a football stadium as the Marathon venue. Football fixtures are not released until late June so we didn’t know when or where they would be playing matches. Other venues and routes were first explored and then ruled out but luckily the stadium came up with a new date of 6-7 September. We kept our runners informed of the changes and moved all entries to the new September date unless they chose one of six options, which included running a virtual marathon In May, a full refund or deferring their entry to the provisional date in May 2021. Over 1000 opted to run virtually, another 1000 requested a refund, and 3000 deferred their entry to 2021, leaving about 3000 entries transferred to the September event. Running virtually simply involved entrants running at a time and place to suit themselves and then uploading a screen shot or photo of their result. Over the summer it started to look more and more unlikely that large running events would be able to resume in September, so we started to explore alternative Covid-safe race options. As race director and the founder of the event I knew we had to think outside the box. This was what evolved, over many weeks, into the “reimagined” race. The initial idea was to design new running routes with chip timing and allow the runner to take part at any time over a two-week period from 6–19 September, with us providing results and a leaderboard. But how could this be done? The team looked at commissioning a wooden start gantry with a locked metal box containing the timing equipment. This would need to be
A re-imagined race safely secured so that it couldn’t hurt anyone and couldn’t be stolen. Permission was granted from The Parks Trust, a local charity who manage all of the green spaces of Milton Keynes to have this installed at Willen Lake using power from the local Splash N Play park. The chip timing technology could start and stop a runner, but there was no way of checking to see if they had completed the full route and distance. We then looked into adding timing points along the route but were not able to find the right technology or get permission for a power source. We switched our attention to GPS tracking and found an app called RunGo, which seemed to offer everything that was necessary. The app worked well during testing and also had the benefit of custom motivational and sponsor messages. Runners could simply upload their result when they had finished their race. All new routes had to be designed using the many cycle paths and parklands in Milton Keynes to minimise road crossings. We decided that it would be simpler to have a
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Distance Running | 2021 Edition 1
two-lap marathon route. All routes were then measured to the AIMS worldwide standard. Runners would be allowed two weeks in which to complete their race(s) and urged to follow social distancing. This was a unique opportunity for entrants to take part in every distance we offered, and a lot of runners did.
