Virtual Marathons/ races, are they going to stay?

robinph wrote: »

Until 2020 a virtual race basically involved running a random distance at a time and place of your choosing and paying someone to post you a medal as far as I could tell. Not at all interested in that kind of "race", but can see why that type of motivation would work for some people.

Now we've had a season of zero racing in any real sense, but lots of variations on how to try to create some kind of something similar.

There were virtual championships setup in the UK to replace the national road relays, and these included various rules on type of course to keep them relatively similar as much as possible such as not being too many laps (so as not to confuse GPS), not being point to point and not having more than a certain amount of elevation drop. It got peoples interest early on in the lockdown (at least those towards the pointier end of club running and also seemed to get some of the people from clubs taking part who'd not normally be on the team bus to run around Sutton Park in Birmingham feeling like they could be involved too).
Great idea put together in short time and great system behind it, can't see it still being done this way in the future though as the moment there is any kind of actual race those people will be back to racing real people again.

There have then been some variations of virtual marathons, with Berlin doing a challenge to see how far you could run in 2hrs, Dublin giving you three days to run one of a variety of distances, and London saying that you could take 24hours to do it in as many goes as you liked but also using the virtual event as a qualification for their next "real" event. I did both London and Dublin and they were both interesting. Did Dublin because I wanted to throw them some money to ensure the event still existed next year, did London because I had to in order to retain my entry. Both apps were equally dodgy, although both worked adequately for me.
London posted out race numbers for everyone and whilst I didn't wear mine as I was running an actual event* for my virtual London, from driving through my town afterwards and to meet some friends who were running their virtual event a bit later in the day there was loads of people out wearing the numbers and getting loads of support from the general public on what was an awful day for the weather. It was a good few ideas they had to make the virtual event work and I think they did very well, making GFA runners race a time was still stupid though.
Have heard loads of people saying they enjoyed it, but despite those people then saying they should do it every year I really can't see how it would work if there is an actual London or Dublin event going on at the same time, the people that want to race the real event will be doing that, and can't see the same atmosphere being created again. It worked because it was a one off.

*Then there are the actual in person events which are happening, but are not really races. I've done a couple of them, one where we started in groups of 6 at 1 minute intervals and then ran 15km around a mountain. Was OK, was good to run hard, but you are not racing anyone as you are just in a random group of other people in your start group of 6. It happened there was someone of a similar standard to me in my group so we had a bit of a race at the end, but was all entirely fake racing.
Then there is the pure time trial that I did for my virtual London, as I wanted a water station and measured course. Wasn't a race in the slightest, although catching and overtaking people towards the end is a great motivation to keep you going those people who I crossed the line seconds in front of were in reality 10's of minutes behind me in the "race". Again not real racing.

Obviously we all hope to be back to proper racing asap, but is there any aspect of the virtual events such as Dublin that anyone liked and would want to see exist after this is all over, and is it likely that anything will actually be kept from what we've had this year?

robinph wrote: »

There is definitely something that the big structures of a Marathon Major creating a virtual event did that captured the imagination of a wider spectrum of people than might normally go to the bother of attempting to enter the ballot. I'm not entirely sure what it is that they enabled that can be replicated under normal circumstances though.

If there is an actual London happening next October, will anyone care about a couple of thousand people who missed out on the ballot running laps of their local park? It worked this year because that was the only option, once racing as normal is back does anyone care about virtual events anymore in sufficient numbers?

There might be room for a virtual event provider to create an app that does tracking and have something more similar to what the big marathons created for this year, but that isn't really what they are setup for. They just want to sell funny looking medals to you for claiming to have run X distance. There might be something for the likes of Strava to create virtual races and they have the tech to do so already and their challenges are practically than anyway. Could they tap another income stream from those who don't want to pay a monthly fee and charge then a couple of quid a time for taking part in a virtual race? Probably not, but it might get them into another demographic of runner.