Champaign, Illinois - Flats or Spikes, Inc. has announced its first virtual race, The Great Sustainable Race, to be held on November 6th, 2021 at 10 AM Central Time. Registration for the Great Sustainable Race is open to participants 13 years of age and older located anywhere in the United States with a 5K event. Flats or Spikes touts the race as the world’s first true virtual race where the race starts at the same time for all participants regardless of where they are located. The company will use its proprietary mobile timing system to start the race clock simultaneously for everyone on the mobile application through a new distributed countdown system. Flats or Spikes has also added a new, age-grading system to the race comparing results to thousands of other 5K runners' results across the world. Anyone can enter the race for free at https://www.flatsorspikes.com/gsr. (Update: Registration is now closed.)
“This race is the first step in making virtual competitions have the feel of an in-person race. We think that this is an important way to make events more engaging and challenging at the same time,” says Brent Trenhaile, PhD and COO of Flats or Spikes. “In-person races will not be replaced, but true virtual events can be used to mark and measure training progress for longer endurance events like half, full, and ultramarathons without the travel and expense and saving precious time for participants,” adds Paul S Miller, PhD and CEO of Flats or Spikes. “The age-grading system we added to the race reflects the performance of all runners regardless of ability. It’s a change from using other methods focused on using world record times, which don’t apply well to the general runner,” says Brent.
Flats or Spikes has partnered with One Tree Planted to plant a tree for every participant that enters the race. The Great Sustainable Race represents Flats or Spikes first foray into virtual racing. Flats or Spikes has big plans to improve the experience over time by adding real-time engagement for participants during the races as well as true personalized predictive analytics for each of its runners. “Once we have runners’ data coming into the platform, we can build a new data-centric future for running where the continual improvement process is modeled with a combination of physics and artificial intelligence. That’s our specialty at Flats or Spikes,” Brent says. “The data science of running is changing, and we want to be a big part of that new future by building a community of like-minded people who want to enjoy a high-quality of life, learn and improve together injury-free,” Paul adds.
About Flats or Spikes
Flats or Spikes, Inc. is a crowdsensing data collection and predictive analytics company helping coaches and athletes to achieve their goals based on science of the human condition. As a start-up, we focus on data, analytics, and science around sport and, particularly, athletic performance. We understand that sports, just like everything truly human, is a community. We seek to serve this community and focus on it directly. We build this to openly create understanding for our customers, using their data to enable them to manage the previously unknown and measure “the it” — their greatness. We help create the possible — quantifying performance of individuals, leaders, and teams to create continual improvement and build quality of life for everyone.