Next Friday will be the Bahrain Marathon Relay. This will be the 36th year that it has been held and I have been part of the organising committee for the last 16 years.
For the last 12 years, I have organised timekeeping. I am the person who burns the midnight oil through Friday night to ensure that the spreadsheet is ready for publication in Sunday’s Gulf Daily News.
We record the times with an old fashioned Palm Pilot and a manual backup and many times I am asked why we are still using such old technology instead of chips and readers.
One of the traditions of the BMR is that every runner who takes part can find out what their time was by looking at the spreadsheet in the GDN.
That is something we would not like to lose, but it means recording 16 times for every team. From this year, we are likely to have 200 teams that means we have to record 3,200 individual times.
We will have a timekeeping post at each changeover stage manned by our wonderful volunteers and that is why we cannot go down the RFID chip route because although the chips are only 50 cents each and we only need one per team fixed to the baton the reading stations are about $8,000 to $10,000 each.
To purchase 16 would be around $150,000 or BD56,700 which is more than the BMR makes in two years, so completely out of the question.
The system we use was created by me in 2004. We purchased 16 Palm Pilots and I wrote an app which records each runner’s time by the operator typing in their number as they cross the changeover line.
Once all runners are past a stage, the Palm Pilot is returned to me in the control room where I download it into an MS Access database on my computer. We then do some checks to make sure we have all teams and no duplicates and then it is posted to the master file.
Since these trusty little Palm Pilots are now 12 years old, we have had a few breakdowns but this year I was able to still purchase replacements from Amazon. Porting the App onto smartphones that could transmit the data live to an Internet page would be the logical progression of this system and to be honest it would not be very difficult to do.
But there is one major reason that we cannot do it and that is because it is almost impossible to see a smartphone screen in strong sunshine, whereas the Palm Pilot screen is very easy to read. Perhaps there is a business idea for someone: Invent a smartphone screen you can read in sunlight.
To all the participants, runners, supporters, timekeepers, marshals and organisers, I hope the day is as successful as all the others and that we do not clog up the roads around the BIC too much. Be patient and have a nice day.
Jackie@JBeedie.com