London Marathon 2009

Poster
Poster
Once again the carnival atmosphere returned to The Island (Isle of Dogs) today, as 35,000+ people ran down our street as part of the London Marathon, including our friend Luke, and our gym instructor Marie-Jane. What a lovely day; sun shining brightly, cool gentle breeze, full tourist boats swanning their way past our flat on the Thames.

We had the 25km marker right out the front of our flat today. Two pads crossed the running track, with four cables protruding from each, connecting with what looked like a scart cable to a yellow box; this contraption was recording each runner as they went past, with an annoying high pitched chirp for each.

This data was probably available from several places; I had tried the Adidas web site, which today seemed to stall under the load. I subscribed for text-message updates on our two friends, however text messages seemed to take up to 30 minutes extra to come through. The web site itself from Adidas was all done in flash, and by design it was impossible to bookmark the runners I was following. Should my mouse run over any of the menus, the main page of the flash app completely disappeared – most disorientating. Adidas, thanks for the effort, but lets get some people with some knowledge of web design involved; how about an RSS feed for my runners? How about a bit more “real-time”?