What do you get when you take a sizeable group of runners, put them in an undercover parking area after dark and replace the usual race route with a maze? You get the uRun+ Maze Run — an event that won’t soon be forgotten.
Held at Menlyn Park Shopping Centre, the event turned a typical parking area into a very atypical race venue. There were lights, a DJ, a buzzing crowd and plenty of competition, with relay teams taking on heats and finals before individual runners got their chance to tackle the course.
This wasn’t a case of simply following a road from the start to the finish. The maze-style course brought speed, strategy and teamwork into the mix, with teams of two taking on the relay challenge and runners having to find their way through an environment unlike anything they’d encounter at a conventional road race. Individual runners took on a 5km course that even saw them traversing parts of the mall en route to their FinishTime.
The atmosphere felt more like a running festival than a traditional race, but while the runners were concentrating on finding their way through the maze, there was another challenge happening behind the scenes. For Team FinishTime, the unusual venue meant an unusual timing environment.
RFID timing is designed to pick up the signals that matter, but an undercover parking area isn’t exactly the same environment as a straightforward road race. There was background noise to contend with, meaning the team had to identify unwanted signals and make sure they didn’t interfere with the actual athlete reads.
Using FinishTime’s timing tools, filters and rules, the team could separate genuine reads from background signals and make sure the results reflected what was actually happening on the course.
Working with RFID timing chips relies on clean, reliable reads, but an indoor parking lot environment created background noise that needed to be identified and filtered out. Using our tools, filters and rules, the FinishTime team was able to distinguish genuine athlete reads from unwanted signals, ensuring that the results reflected what was actually happening on the course.
The event also made good use of live technology, with Team FinishTime turning live timing data into polished, easy-to-read leaderboards displayed on video walls around the venue. Rather than simply supplying the raw results, the team formatted the data and presented it in a way that was clear, engaging and easy for athletes and spectators to follow. This gave everyone an immediate view of how the teams were progressing, adding another layer of excitement to an event where the action unfolded in real time.
It’s a good example of what happens behind the results when an event doesn’t fit the usual mould. The course, format and venue may change, but the need for accurate, dependable timing doesn’t.
For athletes, events like the uRun+ Maze Run are a chance to experience running in a completely different way. For organisers, they show what’s possible when a race isn’t confined to the traditional road-race format. For Team FinishTime, they’re a reminder that, thanks to the versatility of our systems, a lot is possible when it comes to timing events that don’t fit the usual mould.