Sunday’s LaSalle Bank Chicago Marathon boasts 40,000 runners, about 10 times the number of participants, or 4,200, that ran in the first Chicago marathon in 1977.
And while the race has remained 26.2 miles long, nearly everything else about it–from the way it’s managed to the way runners’ family and friends track their participant’s progress through the race–has changed dramatically, said Carey Pinkowski, the race’s executive director for the last 15 years.
Many of those changes have come as a result of technology. Pinkowski, who runs a company called Chicago Event Management Inc. and is contracted by LaSalle Bank to manage the marathon, said technology has particularly affected the way his staff times runners.
In the 1980s, for example, “We used to have numbered bibs on runners, and at the bottom there was a tear tag, which went on a wire in the order that runners finished the race,” he explained. “Then we would painstakingly match their names and finish times to each tag.”
In the early 1990s bar code scanners replaced writing each participant’s name, “so we would scan them as they finished,” recording their position and run times, he said.
But there was a problem to those approaches: Because of the huge number of runners involved, it can take more than 20 minutes for some of the runners to cross the start line.
“So by the time they got across the start line, some runners were already at a 15-20 minute disadvantage.”
Today, this problem is resolved by a small microchip issued to each runner. Attached to their shoelaces, each chip contains a runner’s identity and begins timing only when it crosses a mat at the start line.
There are eight additional mats set up throughout the race, one every 5 kilometers and one at the finish line.
“When our participants cross these mats, the chip identifies them and records their times,” Pinkowski said.
Then the real high-tech fun begins.
Times are sent to the Chicago Marathon’s Web site (www.chicagomarathon.com), where friends and family can log in and track their runner’s progress. And, this being the age of wireless communications, participants can choose to send their loved ones a text message or e-mail updating their performance.
“So if you’re running, you can log into our Web site and give us the cell phone numbers and e-mail addresses you want race updates sent to,” he said.
Things have changed on the back end as well.
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“Ninety-six percent of the people who registered for the marathon did it online. We now have a whole area in our office that’s obsolete–where guys would come in and dump duffel bags full of mail to process.”
Online registration also means that most runners provide an e-mail address. “This allows us to communicate with them,” Pinkowski said.
“For example, this weekend there’s a chance that the fifth game of the White Sox [playoff] series is at U.S. Cellular field, which means we’ll intersect with the traffic trying to get to the park. So we may have to adjust the course. If we do, we’ll just send an e-mail and the majority our participants will know about it.”
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