The first way is the one provided by the California International Marathon itself. Basically what they've done is taken the timing mats they have at the finish line and have placed additional ones at 6 miles, 13.1 miles, and 20 miles. Once the data is collected, it goes straight to the web.
All you have to do is visit the tracking site. Tonight, the have dummy data with all the runners, but after the start at 7am tomorrow morning, everything will be cleared and the real numbers will be displayed. I'm bib #1131. Now for the funny part.
Here's what they have under my name right now:
That's right, they have me finishing in 4:05:55. Is this an accurate prediction? Can I finish in 4 hours and 5 minutes?
Meanwhile, the 2nd option is one I came up with myself. I'm running a program on my Palm Pre called Cell Stalker, which is designed to find your phone if you lose it. At the specified intervals, my phone will "call home", and report to a website its position. Just before the race starts at 7am, I'll turn the program on, and every ten minutes it will update my position on the map. You can get to the map page here.
Yes, I realize it's difficult to tell exactly where I am on the route without knowing what the route actually looks like. If you click here, there's a zoomable map of the California International Marathon route that I'm going to run.
Finally, I'll be using Twitter periodically along the way. What I send to Twitter will also be sent to my Facebook page.
I'm going to have a great day, and want to thank everyone for caring enough to stalk/follow my run. :)
