Active Experience

I have a friend in the LA marathon and I was able to track his splits, but he is an Elite Runner and I wanted to see how he matched up to the leaders of the race. His time 35 kilometers into the races was a whopping 50 seconds ahead of the “first place” runner according to the leaderboards, but my friend wasn’t showing up on the leaderboards. I tuned into the livestream to see if he really was that far ahead, but he was not anywhere near first place. It doesn’t update all of the runners and it’s just so odd that the LA marathon decides to use their own app that barely functions compared to others.

It’s embarrassing to me that an event as large as the LA marathon is using this app. To start, I couldn’t set up an account on the mobile app because it was prompting me to enter my birthday but the drop-down field to enter it wasn’t working. I found a workaround by signing up on my laptop instead. Then, the app description says that there is a gps tracking map where you can track a runner. This is a lie and this feature doesn’t actually exist. To most spectators, this is the single most important feature. I’ve been to large marathons (NYC marathon) and much smaller marathons (smaller cities in California) and all of them have had the ability to track a runner on the map. This app doesn’t even have the course map at all, even WITHOUT a tracking feature, which is also huge a miss. There is no reason for the LA Marathon to be using this app when better ones exist - and judging by the other reviews they’ve been using it for many years. Again, just embarrassing.

I would rate negative stars if I could. Absolute garbage of an app. Fails at its core purpose of tracking runners. Made sure to request following a runner in the LA marathon and confirmed that the runner accepted the request. App notes that I’m “Following” the runner but their location is nowhere to be seen. Good thing we noticed the other 1 star reviews and asked dad to carry his phone with him just in case. He didn’t want to carry the extra weight we’re glad we insisted. Events should completely stop using this app and move to a competitor. The $100+ entrance fees for participants should guarantee a seemless experience for families to accurately track and cheer them on at different points in the race.