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

Cambridge Half and Steyning Stinger 2025 galleries

Jonathan Escalante Perse School Maths teacher wins the Cambridge Half 2025 

Links to search the Cambridge half photos and the steyning stinger photos can be found here: all free download galleries with upgrades available.

https://sussexsportphotography.com/ 

It's funny how life goes round in circles - it was my Perse School Maths teacher (Bob Smith) who was John Ridgeon's hurdle coach when he was at Cambridge University in 1981/82 (John is now the President of European Athletics, and was the GBR no1 Hurdler before Colin Jackson) (Bob still coaches at Cambridge and Coleridge AC), who got me into athletics and hurdling when I was 12. (He omitted to tell me that at the time, or the fact he was the Welsh national hurdles coach...) I left the Perse after that ! and that sort of turned out ok only hurdling again at Uni with Nick Dakin as my coach, and now my eldest daughter has competed at the British Indoor Championships - at the 60m Hurdles - at the age of 17 - which is impressive and she came 4th in her heat - warming up with KJT was hopefully the start of a lifetime of elite athletics experiences and fun for her.

 And then here's a photo of a Perse school maths teacher - taken by my youngest (who I do pay the going rate - because frankly - she did a great job and easily as good as the rest of the team). So - all going round in circles... Cambridge seems to do that. 

anyone for a split level finish arch ? not seen one of these before !

 

I always think this is the fetch Batman sign.

We found spiderman

Banana man always saved the day really

Spare arm man 

Obergine man ?

Barefoot ? - must be Cindarella then !

Robyn to the rescue

DO.NOT.MESS raaaaaaaa

I really want to see this persons triple jump

Wheelbarrow and a cement mixer for Great Ormond Street

Pink Lady high fives !

Checking for the latest fashion trends on his phone ?
My suggestion is race number on the front. Always.

Getting that wideangle with the background of StJohns 

Meanwhile up on the hills in Sussex - was the Steyning Stinger Marathon and Half Marathon

Essentially, it's hilly, and if you do the marathon - you get three iron age forts - which obviously - were not put on the lowlands...

I now apologise if my rantings devolve into a TED talk about why pinning your number to your shorts is a really crap idea. But you can probably see why when you look at these photos and try to read the numbers for yourself. Being able to find your photos is a collaborative piece of work.

Only two of these runners wanted to find their photos

The hills are alive

zoom zoom plane zoom

no surrender

Here you go - relaxed thumbs up and all good

I want you to read it, but will then cover it up deliberately

read my barcode

here's how you do it, but mind that hydration vest

Dads alive !!

nice running style, shame we can't tag it to show you !

So that was the two races - perfect conditions and excellent running had by all. I miss doing the stinger, as I have to be at Cambridge - being 14,000 runners has somewhat taken priority for me these last years.

meanwhile...

Another sun rotation and I get to mark my birthday with Cambridge Half and Steyning Stinger preparation, not less including the last parents evening for my eldest daughter about to get her A levels revision ship sailing. Not quite the Birthday experience I had anticipated on what could have been my early retirement day. I am old beyond my expectations.

Packing a van and getting up to Cambridge on the saturday for on-site testing for the internet connection all went smoothly, the M11 crash was cleared by the time we got there, and then the small matter of getting the computers all networked and running and connected to the university fibre backbone and hey presto - good to go for live pictures during the day. Or so I ha dhoped.

Yes it does look like a van MI5 might be operating by the time we have kitted it out but it does get a little worrying when the "media converter" that converts fibre cable to good old RJ45 Lan cable has been used "elsewhere"... everything was working except that bit, so with a promise of something would be done in the morning at 8am, it was off to hotel and get ready for the mornings fun. Up at 6am and onsite again checking everything is working and plugged in and functioning - the team arrived and welcomes and final briefings were had. Then at 8:25 the magic man appeared with a media converter, and four tense minutes of plugging in, nothing working and then a complete system reboot (just the four computers in the right sequence) and it all seemed to settle down and they could all network together in sweet harmony. Phew !. Able to walk off to my spot knowing that the rest of the day was set fair. The weather was perfect thankfully - dry, and warm, and no cold wind. High contrast sun can cause problems though - which wasn't ideal but its a damn site better than rain !

They fortunately had the same weather at Steyning and up the top of Chanctonbury ring - which if you ever do get to visit up there and stand on the dip (saddle) between the hill top - you'll discover it is the biggest valley channel of cold air straight off the seafront near worthing and up to the top of the downs. Ideally they should put some wind turbines up there, but y'now, it's the south downs, so you can't. But boy would they work well.

Suffice to say that we took about 400,000 photos at Cambridge, and the barcodes worked - because they do, and are more accurate than AI number guessing or face matching, and use considerably less computer processing power, and we can do it on local computers - we don't have to upload the full size files to the cloud. we get about a 11% error rate this year - mostly due to improper wearing, and after manually quality checking - we got the percentage of images without any tagging down to under 0.6%.

By comparison... If you want to see how good AI cataloguing stuff works - go to the Surrey Half marathon results, and for anyone in the results - click on the photo icon to see their photos - and then - count how many actual photos are the right ones for that person. (please for the love of professional decency don't critique the actual focus of the images they have put online or their composition) I tested their gallery on a fair few, but for a direct analysis- the second place runner had 6 actual photos identified by number, but 21 more of other people in the search results. That isn't a very helpful tagging system by my standards. Runners should not be satisfied when that is presented to you either. Some event organisers simply don't care about the quality of their photos, their search engine, or the post-event engagement and promotion. "providing free photos" no matter how bad, seems to be their box ticking exercise.

The biggest bottleneck we have is simply uploading that volume of images, the tagging is pretty quick (because barcodes work, and enough computers spreads out the work), we had 150,000 uploaded by the time we left site at 3pm, and the rest - well that took until 6am and I got up every three hours in the night to check all was ok - even with fibre broadband upload connections because it's simply *a lot of photos*. 

At the time of writing we've had over 895k pageviews on the gallery, and with all the free downloads - I'm confident that the brand reach of the Cambridge Half marathon has hit every social channel for everyone in East Anglia, along the A14 corridor and up and down the A1 corridor - very very thoroughly !

So yes - very happy with the job done, and also very proud of the work my team did on the day, Especially my no-so-kids #proudDad.

https://www.brentwoodhalf.org/

Next weekend is the Brentwood Half marathon - sold out again and looking to be a great event as ever - and hopefully not cold and not raining !!

And my apologies to all and everyone in the National Cross Country Championships - the sponsors changed from Saucony, and the new ones (who will remain nameless, because why should I promote them?) hadn't any sort of a budget for participant photography and free downloads. First question posted by someone else on their facebook event page was "are pic2go [ed:thats us and our tech that is] covering it again this year ?". I think they now know they might have missed a trick.

 There's more detail, suffice to say we tried - sorry ! Also whilst we're on these topics, we also lost the contract to cover the Macmillan Mighty Hikes, which with over 1.71 million images for the series online, and having provided over 109,000 participants with their fundraising memories across 87 Mighty Hikes, since 2018 - is something we're very proud of having helped them achieve, growing the event and brand from just 6 initial events a year to 15 weekends last year - many including half marathons on the sunday for a two day weekend.

To say the Mighty Hikes going has left a very large hole in our calendar for the second part of the year. Since covid we haven't been re-filling the pipeline of events with new work as dilligently as we should have. And to be honest - the Hikes were extremely busy - almost two months solid without a rest day. Our capacity to do other work or even research other work was severely hindered.  Meanwhile - technology and online platforms have all moved on and changed. We need to too. Change is hard. Let's see what happens.

One of the more interesting trends in the charity marketplace is to see that four major charities are now doing marathon or half marathon hikes - and advertising aggressively - simply because justgiving has pointed out the mighty hikes continue to be their number one fundraising events. Cancer research, Altzheimers, and British heart foundation are all looking at similar activities - all in very similar locations, all using similar wording to promote themselves and cause confusion in the consumer arena.

check this list out and spot the differences: https://www.bhf.org.uk/how-you-can-help/events/walks-and-treks?eventType=walks-and-hikes&sort=0

So the world moves on, the competitive nature of charity fundraising and cost-cutting continues, things are tough out there. We are going to take a breather, dry out and see what's occuring.

High five for a job well done in testing conditions

So hopfully see you at the Brentwood Half, and then after that in April - the Southampton full, half and 10k will be a great days running to be had too.

Until next time - keep fit, run safe, get that sleep in, and enjoy this sunshine !

Anthony