Wejo please help = new idea for “Race Event Reminder App” ….notification on your phone 5 minutes before event

The biggest problem, as I see it, is that so many meets end up getting off schedule. Not as big of a deal with the top meets (Worlds, Olys, etc), but still - relying on the posted schedule in T&F will lead to grief. So the app would need to have someone onsite or plug into the feed so that it gives the notification 5 minutes before the event *actually happens*, rather than 5 minutes before the event is scheduled to happen (which could be 10-30 minutes before or after it actually happened).

I'll throw in $6 for this. How long until it's ready?

Please add my race to the calendar. We only have one marquee event called "The Boogie Shuffle" (it's a 100m potato sack race), so should be simple.

Sincerely,
Harry Johnson (race coordinator for "The Booger Invitational")

I couldn't read the whole post. But I will help you out.

Smartphones have a calendar app. Look at the race schedule, and set calendar reminders in the app for the races you want to see that day and Voila! You will get notified 5 minutes in advance of each race.

Could we also get an app that reminds me to poop? The old way of doing so is very inconvenient and makes it hard to schedule my busy day of LRC sh**posting, drinking beer, and binging shows on Netflix. Instead of feeling pressure in my anal region or cutting a fart, could some tech genius here devise a predictive AI that will text me a reminder to drop a deuce? That would be awesome and I would drop $10 for someone to develop that. My time fighting Internet trolls over politics and social issues is too precious to allow the seeming randomness of colon pressure and abdominal cramps to remind me that nature is urgently calling.

Yeah, the cameras in the bib, safety pin small, would be awesome. Like in cycling on a bike camera footage is often breathtaking!

This. I also like the idea. A lot of people are making fun of the OP (probably because of his very long post), but the key is having all the meets listed in one place. We don't even need an app; just have a corner of the Letsrun homepage dedicated to a calendar of upcoming meets with links on how to watch and why I should.

If I want to watch a baseball game, I just go to mlb.com, where I can see when my favorite team is playing that day or the next. Then I can click on mlb tv, and if I've subscribed I can watch the game right then and there. I doubt running will ever get there without a single governing body, but there's got to be something better than the current system.

This is an absolute crisis for the sport. Aside from a couple Kipchoge/Gidey races and the Olympics, I don't think I've watched a track/road race live in 5 years. And I'm a pretty big fan. Call me lazy, but it's kind of nuts how little track most of us actually end up watching. Any ideas are welcome with me, including the OP's

If I had the reminder app that gave me the link, I would have watched 5-6 races this weekend. Without it, I watched 0 races. If we had the race calendar on LetsRun with the links, I still wouldn’t have watched. I can look at that race calendar the morning of the races and want to watch, but the day takes hold of you and by 6-7pm I’m pulled into other things and forget . If I had the reminder app, I would get the app notification on the way to picking up pizza that the BU 3k goes off in 5 min, with the notification providing the link to the stream. I would sit in the pizza parking lot and watch the race.

Ill do it for free, just give me the data where i can get all of the meet information

Thank you for offering to help us build this, especially for free, wow!

I can think of two ways that would get you the data on a daily/weekly basis. These are non-genius suggestions. If we had a genius, maybe there is a way to use code to pull the data automatically from the major sites.

1. Since Gault/LetsRun lists all of this information in separate articles already, they create a section on LetsRun with a “Race Calendar” that contains all the information. The week of the races, they will load all of that information there and the app pulls it. Someone needs to get in touch with Rojo/Wejo on this, as this is big.

2. We contact the streaming providers (FloTrack, RunnerSpace, SoundRunning, The Ten, Peacock) about the new app. They get an app access where they update the race info for the races they are streaming with the information we need . They can do it weekly, monthly, whenever. We tell them, “you want more people to watch? You better update this app with your races. everyone is going to be using this. This will increase your race viewership 10x”.

Lol. If LRC was more focused on improving the site they could just add a calendar file link for each event to articles or a single weekly article. Click the link and the reminder will ask to be added to your calendar. This is pretty easy to do. Alternatively deliver via user email. Doesn’t require yet another app that no one wants on their device.

Also, put the streaming options for the event in the reminder.

This doesn’t solve it. We want to be able to select reminders for just specific races within a meet. The calendar reminder right before the meet starts still requires us to either watch for 2 hours until the race we’re interested in comes on, or we have set our own reminder to check back later right before the race we want to see.

Those of us that want this aren’t just bored and looking for a new app. This is a real issue. We don’t watch the races because currently it’s convoluted, with multiple races through different providers, timezone differences, and LetsRun being the only place that would remind me there are races. If I don’t visit LetsRun for a few days, I might not even know there meets going off.

Give me a simple app where I go in each week, click on the races I want to receive reminders for (with the streaming link). Once I make my selections, I can then immediately relax knowing I can forget about it and will be getting an email that day from the app telling me what’s on my list for tonight and then the notifications come in 5 or 10 minutes before the few races I want to watch.

It does solve it. Add a table with events. Each event has a link. No reason for a special app to add things to your calendar. Heck websites can do push notifications also.

What you want does require the meet to run on time, which is not a given.

This would be fine. Your essentially saying just build it out inside the website rather than in an app. The app would still be better for clean interface, dedicated profile with your selected setting, etc, but we’ll be fine with the LetsRun race calendar.

Let us know what your next steps are to put this in place with Rojo/Wejo.

Lol. The hard part is actually continually gathering the data and entering it. It is a pain for the same reason you don’t want to manually do it. I guess some page scrape importers could be built for some common sources.

This is easily done in AWS, no app needed, but to get a toll-free number (necessary to push bulk SMS messages to subscribers) you've got to have a business license, which costs at least a grand. If you guys are interested in subscribing for a fee, I'd be happy to set this up. If there are enough subscribers the subscription fee could be very cheap.

Is $10 a year too much to ask? I'd have to have 100 subscribers for a year to break even.

Also, my own gripe about lets run is that they don't have a calendar of events somewhere on the side of the screen. There should be a column of major meets (NCAA, Diamond League, USAs, Worlds, etc) with dates. If I didn't visit the site all the time I wouldn't know when the next meet worth watching is.

Yeah i think this is an interesting idea, might look into how tfrrs creates their scheduling as well

i can make a standalone app, or progressive webapp that you can 'install' onto your device's home screen. Ive done done this for a fantasy sports app i use for draftkings and espn stuff

Now we’re cooking boys! Great! I am willing to put in $100 to get this thing going. I think it’s something that once we have it, we’ll be shocked we went so long with out it.