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| 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.
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| anyone for a split level finish arch ? not seen one of these before ! |
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| I always think this is the fetch Batman sign. |
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| We found spiderman |
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| Banana man always saved the day really |
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| Spare arm man |
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| Obergine man ? |
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| Barefoot ? - must be Cindarella then ! |
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| Robyn to the rescue |
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| DO.NOT.MESS raaaaaaaa |
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| I really want to see this persons triple jump |
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| Wheelbarrow and a cement mixer for Great Ormond Street |
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| Pink Lady high fives ! |
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| Checking for the latest fashion trends on his phone ? My suggestion is race number on the front. Always. |
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| 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.
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| Only two of these runners wanted to find their photos |
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| The hills are alive |
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| zoom zoom plane zoom |
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| no surrender |
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| Here you go - relaxed thumbs up and all good |
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| I want you to read it, but will then cover it up deliberately |
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| read my barcode |
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| here's how you do it, but mind that hydration vest |
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| Dads alive !! |
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| 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.
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| 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
