openpolitics.com

With Gadgetry, New York Marathon May Be Watched Like No Other

“Our objective is to be the most technologically advanced marathon in the world,” said Peter Ciaccia, the chief production officer for New York Road Runners, which organizes the marathon. “We can take this data and have fun with it.”

.. Marathon organizers track runners’ times at every mile split and every five kilometers of the course, roughly 1.6 million pieces of unique data, Ciaccia said. Such tracking will further alleviate the rare and eccentric cheating attempts and may be shared with runners in the future who are hoping to gain better insight into their race performance.

“We’re not at a level where we’re collecting step-by-step GPS data that a Garmin or FitBit would collect,” Ciaccia said. “But that’s not far away. We’re creating a concept of a runner cloud.”