Southampton Marathon Festival 2025, Cowdray Spring Run the seasons, and the REP Findon 10k all live

 

All go at the start of the Southampton Half and Full Marathon 2025 (this angle doesn't do it justice to be honest)

Apologies, I ought to have posted about the galleries being ready sooner, but I know you all got emails and the traffic was phenomenal so I hoped you would all have a good idea where to go. If you're in any doubt - have a look through this page on our gallery and have a catchup on all the April action !

https://gallerylink.info/April-2025-events

Yes they do a canicross too at REP events

This weekend coming we have the REP Angmering bluebell 10k, which goes along private estate and woods that you don't usually get access to - which makes it all the more special, plus it finishes at a pub... what more do you want ?   https://rawenergypursuits.co.uk/bluebell-trail-run-angmering-2025/ (Sorry it's sold out)

Also this weekend is the official run one of those "proper marathons" that the well initiated call them - and we get into the battle of Manchester versus London. Or more accurately the clash of the event organisers - The London Marathon Events https://www.londonmarathonevents.co.uk/- versus ASO (aka The company that owns the Tour De France, who bought Human Race Events, and then funded buying out a load of big events) https://www.aso.fr/en/ . I had someone from ASO nosing around on my linkedin the other day - always interesting.

I still challenge the Manchester marathons claim to being the flattest - because the Abingdon Marathon is by far a much flatter course...apart from the pedestrian underpass. Apparently having a partial two lap loop even if it is on closed roads makes the whole claim invalid apparently according to some, to which I say I think the Elevation measurements are what count. Although these days the Manc course is slightly different - and wikipedia says different. 

Either way - neither of  "the" marathon events have free photos - so they will have the joys of paying for sportograph's logo on their photos in Manchester or who knows what at London - because I can't find anything on the London Marathon website about race photos... They used AWOL for their Brighton Marathon efforts recently, but sportograph have tried to do the job themselves too. Frankly - yes it's a lot of money however it's done - but the sheer volume of data management isn't funny, let alone the scale of the job. It took one of my friends 3 hours before they managed to copy his data cards after the end of the event one year - that's not good photographer management...

Somewhat amusingly I listened to an industry podcast with the UK head of ASO as the guest, and all they went on about putting on events was the importance of imagery and look and creating memories from these moments, and having a great backdrop to put the events on against. It was like asking someone to describe what a photograph is without using the word photograph. And yet this is all I hear event organisers aspiring to achieve but for some reason they haven't figured out what they're describing is a photograph. Le Sigh.

Anyway best avoid all the "THE" marathon hype and I hope you enjoy yourselves if you're doing it.

Proper trail running marathon with hills and friends

And if you've missed that or fancy something the week after that on the 4th May - then get your socks on and enter the 3 Forts Challenge - a 5mile, half marathon or marathon+ are on offer here - because sunday is the very last chance to enter : https://gallerylink.info/3Forts-challenge

It is a beautiful course, and really gives you some of the best views around the south downs between Hove and Worthing and the Adur valley if you're doing the Full route, and the half route ain't half bad either ! Don't forget this year it's all changed to Lancing Leisure centre too https://w3w.co/look.brick.adverbs - so it's going to be a different hill profile sequence and is going to make a bit of a difference to the times people bring in.

Anyway, enough of the event sales pitches - have a look at these silly selection of images and have a wonderful weekend, and enjoy the sunny weather next week, and don't get dehydrated in the warmer weather either. 

And here's a top tip - grab those chemical ice packs (small plastic bags) that you have to snap and shake and then they go cold - when you get hot and bothered - carry one in each hand and use them to cool your palms - which will lead to major core body temperature cooling - which is what you want !! cheatcode - unlocked ! (this is the sort of thing I mean: https://amzn.to/3Yh9I5f )

Anyway here's some Southampton marathon festival photos for you - it's tenth time - and what a time it was !

Spiderman got up early in his PJ's

Running Scared ? The unicorn was causing all sorts of problems..

postbox delivered safely to the finish

you will be assimilated

YES ! 

"I'm running how slowly !?!?"

The inflatable cow. He's not running to Burger King for a milkshake...

Yeah, sure thing, Step right up. By all means. Be our guest. Hope you got your nice shot of the back of their head too. Awesome. Good job. Now, if you don't mind....bit busy.

Freedom ! from the oppression of hydration vests !!

Gothic fur running, carrying a bunny. Not seen that before.

Carrot not stick approach for motivating Nick

James almost finished it

Swift Fade and UTurn to the family. PB out of the window then...

This does explain the faster runners earlier

He knew the crisps were waiting for him later, that's why he's so happy

Fetchie Friends always get a shout out ! Go Yas !!

Liz approved

Just the one shot from the Cowdray Run the Seasons Spring run. Because.

Must be the hayfever season then?

So see you all at Bluebell 10k in Angmering, and after that at the 3Forts challenge, so keep yourself safe and enjoy the weather, keep cool and hydrated...

Until next time

Anthony

Brentwood Half Marathon 2025

As I was writing this blog it occured to me that I might get more engagement if I used the Signal platform instead - and just randomly added you to the group chat about different running events? because we'd all like that right ? 

Nope. 

Even GDPR prevents me from just adding you randomly to a distribution list, let alone a confidential top level government military planning and update chat on unsecure devices and dissapearing messages on unauthorised comms channels. But I digress... let's all pretend to live in the real world where responsible adults are in charge... and they were at the Brentwood Half Marathon !

All go at the front end of race day starts - some random photographer almost got themselves run over and just escaped in time. Ruined the main start break photo so that's why you get this later one instead.

The Brentwood Half 2025 Gallery is now live and online here: https://gallerylink.info/Brentwood-Half-2025

Free downloads with this years event logo and sponsors Baker Labels https://www.bakerlabels.co.uk/  nicely on the bottom to make them the memories that they are !

With almost 2000 participants on the day and sold out tickets this year for the half marathon it was perfect conditions for this years race. Ideal temperature with almost no wind to speak of. The slightly soggy mizzle that fell through the latter part of the race didn't dampen the atmosphere at the finish line - the new configuration with the swapping of the ambulance safety route and the runners route meant that the crowd was nearer the final 200m run in to the finish arch and could give it some proper shouting.

It was a tight race at the front end with the first three all clocking sub1:10 check the results:  https://results.sporthive.com/events/7308802695790329856  and a winning time of 1:05.33 for Adam Hickey who's quite a succesfull athlete... https://www.instagram.com/run.hickey.run/

proper way to finish as a winner with happy zoom wing arms

I think she drinks Red Bull ?

he's off to a flier - lets see if he gets himself a record at London for running as a Roman Centurion

Double pistol pointing for 10 points

Double tasking - it's good to chat

victory day

no, the real finish is over there...

we were just as surprised as her

and here's one I prepared incorrectly earlier. 
DO NOT FOLD YOUR RACE NUMBER
DO NOT PUT PINS THROUGH THE BARCODES - THEY DON'T WORK THEN

Short term victories

going to take some special action to read that number

Mums rock

not covering with hydration vest - good. Folding and pinning through barcodes - bad

Checking that Signal app just in case near the finish

She was definetly invited into the singal group

when You think nobody goings to spot you being silly

He ran ALL THE WAY holding his phone like this. Either a really fun video or he's praying to the running gods.

When 60's fashion chic meets running reality (the sequence shows no dogs were harmed).

Once again the Brentwood Half coalition of event organisers pulled it off and congratulations are due.

 Similar to many events organised by a single charity body in the past - it was with Covid that the whole event was put in jeapardy. Many races in this position have outsourced to professional race organisers - who quite rightly take their costs - but The Bretwood Rotary did things a bit different - They reached out to other local charites who are good at organising things (like theatres - who are used to public admin and organising), the local running club (that understand the importance of routage and marshalling), and other charities that get how to get volunteers involved, and their local main sponsor - who has the marketing, publicity and internet skills to make sure the event is promoted and sold out - yet again this year.

It's a unique combination that we see here - too often we see a charity relying on it's members and as we've been going for 21 years - inevitably those members have gone through active retirement into restful retirement - and then things simply don't get backfilled with talent. By spreading the load across the different specialisations the Brentwood Rotary has spread the risk, and also the workload to great effect.

Talking of spreading the risk - a sympathetic shout out to the Hastings half - another charity event that has outsourced it to a professional organisers Nice Work (who we have worked with many times over the decades) - who were faced with the first 800m of their race route and the entire event village being included in a police cordon exclusion zone....

I've not seen anyone produce a helpful diagram of why - so here you go:

Hastings Half Marathon - Police closed the road due to a chemical stockpile

Credit to the organisers - they did try to hold on as long as possible and with saturday afternoon seeing the police perform a controlled burn of chemicals literally in a skip in the road - you'd have hoped that the all clear would be given at the end of saturday - but alas it was not to be and they called it at around 9pm. The frustration of the police then calling it all clear on Sunday at around 11am must have been immense - and one wonders what was left to be checked sunday morning to push that decision into the next day. I guess just waiting for the skip to cool down might have been one of them... never return to a lit firework...

So it was a busy weekend with plenty of other half marathons and 10ks going on around the country. If you're ever wondering where the best place to find out where and what to race - then I recommend to you the race listings of Fetcheveryone.com Race Finder. This is what it looks like for me https://www.fetcheveryone.com/race-finder.php?latitude=51.0958&longitude=-0.1503&maxtravel=20&night=0  

We have the busiest of April Starts coming up with the following main events - so get yourself entered if it seems interesting:

REP Cowdray Run the Season 5k,10k,10M https://rawenergypursuits.co.uk/rep-news/cowdray-spring-10km-10mile/

Southampton Marafun (half, full, 10k and 5k) https://www.southamptonmarathon.co.uk/

Race gallery technology and trying to work out what is best

So since Covid, a whole five years ago now, it is fair to say that the technology has changed in terms of race photography galleries and the speed that they can be put online. Always the answer to the questions of user experience is - " is it good enough?" do you really need live photos?, do they all have to be in focus?, do they really need to be 100% accurate ?, do you want to make it easy to download with a single click? should you only sell the photos ?

I'm having a good look about, and the two main things that have struck me with the offerings in the general marketplace is 1. Selfie search and 2. Gallery solutions promoting photo sales (and 100% pushing and prodding individual photographers to do ALL the work and only to sell images) and not free downloads.

firstly - selfie search. Ignoring the personal privacy elements of how this could be abused (I'm not saying they do at the moment) but gathering everyones MAC address and Face ID data is a serious GDPR security issue. Usually followed by "I didn't think we did that..."  why risk this in the first place ?

The more annoying thing about selfie search - is that it can spot a face very accurately that is completely out of focus. which to me - isn't what I want as a runner. and then again - do I want to see the entire sequence of images with me coming up the background and then the subject of the photos. That's not so bad. But what if I had to pay for them - and then I bought a picture I thought was in focus - but actually once I bought it - I find out I'm quite a bit out of focus - that would be annoying.

Also the AI for reading race numbers is not that good, certainly not 100% accurate as barcodes are, and also completely incapable of saying "I don't know - can you do it" for partial numbers or difficult digits and fonts (don't tell one company that uses AI number tagging but their bib font - to say the least - ain't AI friendly!)

Secondly - all the platforms providing photographers with gallery hosting solutions for events - with AI number tagging and face recognition - all promote photo sales and not free downloads. Why ? simply because they take a very healthy cut of the sales for the work done. Remembering that we had a good 15 years of doing photo sales - so we know how the economics and effort of this works. I've done the maths and it's cheaper to do it manually - paying well above minimum wages. That then brings in the question of speed and efficiency - which over 20 years we have got quite good at. Honestly - having these gallery companies pushing all the risk on to the photographers, all the marketing and not educating them to get some skin in the game from the event organisers isn't very fair. One thing I've learned - if the event organiser doesn't have some investment - then they just don't have the commitment to do the emails and communication necessary to ensure all participants have an easy journey to see their photos. It is sadly just frustratingly dissapointing - but that's the way it always was.

Barcodes - our secret weapon - simply put Barcodes work. and it doesn't cost us anything to process them on the computer at incredibly fast rates. For the same reason that the supermarket uses them - they're very good for number input and super simple. The good thing about barcodes is - if the subject in the image is out of focus - it can't read the barcode - it's that simple. So we don't tag anyone that is out of focus. Secondly - if it doesn't tag anyone in the image it tells us - and that's when we do our manual tagging. For Brentwood - we were at tabout 10% of images having nobody identified in them - and it took about 8 staff hours in total to do the quality checking and manual corrections or editing out. 

So I'm trying to figure out what is best - and have now double loaded the Brenwood gallery onto our usual site, but also onto a gallery that ignores all our hard work, and tries to read the race numbers and does facilitate selfie recognition - https://gallerylink.info/selfie-search-brentwoodhalf2025-test  (i'm sure a great many of you are familiar with photohawk - the bacground tech) That means that the second gallery doesn't have a lot of the chaff that we have edited out (the intervalometer taking a picture every second at the finish has had the empty frames removed) so those false results are not in there - but it's an interesting comparison. 

Search on your race number on both platforms and compare the results, do you get the same pictures ? which one is best ?  and then click on your face icon and see how many more out of focus images it finds of you.... (and if you want the free download - check the filenumber and return to the free download gallery). This is a genuine test - because does it give you a better, worse, or good enough experience ?

However I'm faced with what are extrmely high prices if I was to make this a free download gallery on the alternative gallery, and as you know I don't much believe in the sales model these days - so I won't be going there anytime soon. It's understandable that these platforms are promoting the sales model and not encouraging sponsored race photos.

And then that brings us onto the next dilemma - none of the platforms provide the sort of metrics, integration, sharing, linking, advertising and brand promotion beyond a logo or two on the image - that an event sponsor should get for their money. I guess its because it's not in their interests too. Which then brings us on to what is the next stage for world domination.... and how do we solve this? 

How do we create a platform that sponsors are willing to pay the money to give you guys free race  downloads ? Because that's what we all want isn't it ? In the meantime "is the lowest price the only thing you're looking for in this service?" is going to get asked of all our posisble clients when we put in bids...

Going to have to work on this one a bit longer, suggestions by reply please !

Until next time - which for me personally will be at Southampton marafun - train safe, enjoy this warm and sunny spell and roll with it ! 

Anthony