New York City Marathon taps into technology

From...

by Cathleen Moore

(IDG) -- Just weeks after the World Series brought the attention of legions of sports fans to the Big Apple, participants and spectators from all over the world will converge on the city Nov. 5 for the New York City Marathon.

Not only will approximately 30,000 participating athletes, from 100 countries, and more than 2 million spectators fill the streets of New York, but the event is also expected to draw a record number of visitors to the marathon's Web site.

As the Olympics recently illustrated, a corresponding Internet presence has become a vital source of information and entertainment for major sporting events.

New York City Marathon organizers this year spruced up the marathon's Web capabilities with new real-time data feeds from the course and personalized athlete tracking features. Additionally, the New York Road Runners Club, which is a non-profit organization that sponsors the marathon, boosted the Web site's underlying infrastructure with a content delivery service designed to accommodate the expected increased number of page views.

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At the 10-kilometer, half marathon, and 20-mile points in the race, data will be collected from the runners using a timing system from ChampionChip, a company based in The Netherlands. ChampionChip makes mats that are placed at the finish line and other locations throughout the course to record a runner's times. High-speed transponder chips attached to the shoes of runners transmit the recorded times to antennas within the mats.

Marathon organizers plan to use wireless data services from Reston, Va.-based Nextel Communications to relay this information from the course to the Internet. The tracking system will allow Web-based spectators to follow runners in real time as they move through the five boroughs, according to Alice Schneider, vice president computer services at the New York Road Runners Club, in New York.

By entering a runner's name and identification number, Web spectators can create a personal tracking page for an individual runner. A real-time tracker will appear in a separate window that is refreshed automatically with updated content.

"We will have a huge peak of [Web] traffic on marathon day. We are expecting even more traffic this year as people watch over the Internet the progress of people they know in the marathon," Schneider said.

To handle this cyber traffic jam, the New York Road Runner's Club leveraged a content delivery network service from Woburn, Mass.-based Mirror Image Internet.

"The NYC Road Runners club gets a few thousand hits per day. During the five days around the marathon, it could be millions of page views a day. And they will get hammered in the hour of the finish," said Jeff Schutzman, general manager of instaContent services at Mirror Image Internet. "Without changing hardware or software, the instaContent [service] gives them the capacity to service millions of requests at the same time."

Mirror Image Internet's instaContent Global Distribution Service distributes Web content locally through the company's network of large, mainframe-based data centers, which are located in major cities around the world.

This service stores Web content closer to end-users, which helps boost site speed by minimizing the load placed on the original servers and removing the performance drain of sending the data over long distances, according to officials at Mirror Image.

Mirror Image touted the instaContent service's ability to transform small Web sites with limited infrastructure into powerful systems by lending the power of an enormous infrastructure.

"With [our] massive architecture we can handle millions of simultaneous requests from someone whose Web server could be on the equivalent of a desktop PC," Mirror Image's Schutzman said.

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New York City Marathon Site
New York City Road Runners Club

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