Tech support: how to track runners at the London Marathon 2018

Tech support: how to track runners at the London Marathon 2018

Just because you’re not running the London Marathon this Sunday doesn’t mean you can’t still have a part to play. Got friends running? Find a spot along the route, perhaps somewhere near a nice pub, and you can work out when you need to be standing outside cheering your lungs off using one of these techy trackers.

If they’re a Strava fan…Strava Beacon

Strava’s Beacon feature, which lets Premium subscribers share their real-time location with up to three people, was designed as a safety feature, but as it sends updates every 15 seconds it’s a great way of keeping track of a runner’s progress. They’ll need to be using the app on their phone, or via one of Garmin’s supported running watches, but spectators only need a web browser to stay up to date, plus they don’t need to be Strava users themselves.

If they’re a ‘serious’ runner…Garmin LiveTrack

If your marathon-running friend wants you to have all of their live stats, including heart-rate, cadence and elevation, along with their location, then Garmin’s LiveTrack app is your best bet. It only works with a few Garmin watches – including the Forerunner 230, 235, 630, 735XT and Fenix 5/5S/5X – but assuming they’ve got one of those and they don’t mind running with their phone, they’ll be able to start a Livetrack session in the Garmin Connect app and share the web link with you via email, Facebook or Twitter.

If they want to run phone-free…the official London Marathon app (iOS and Android)

Now available for Android phones as well as iOS, this official app allows you to track your friends without requiring them to carry their phone. Add their name or bib number to the ‘favourites’ section and you’ll get their estimated position every 5km, based on timings from official race chips given to each runner. It’s not quite the same as live-tracking someone for the whole race, but the app will also predict the time your runner will get to the next 5km checkpoint based on their current pace.

Best of the rest…

If your runner doesn’t use Strava or Garmin Connect, there’s a chance they might subscribe to Runtastic Pro or Runkeeper Go, which both also offer live-tracking options. Failing that you can just go to the official London Marathon website where you’ll find a link to the tracking service that the app uses, or you can use the table of time estimates to plot expected arrival times on a race map.