Started thinking about upcoming Boston marathon. My daughter is threatening to come down from Burlington to watch. Having done my first last year I can’t imagine trying to find someone in that race. I don’t like carrying a phone and it got me thinking about carrying an airtag in my pocket. With all the spectators for that race I would think there would be excellent coverage for her to track me. Anyone tried this? Pros or cons?
Started thinking about upcoming Boston marathon. My daughter is threatening to come down from Burlington to watch. Having done my first last year I can’t imagine trying to find someone in that race. I don’t like carrying a phone and it got me thinking about carrying an airtag in my pocket. With all the spectators for that race I would think there would be excellent coverage for her to track me. Anyone tried this? Pros or cons?
No experience with an AirTag but have you considered a flip belt for your phone? I used it at the NYCM and didn’t feel it while running.
I’ve use it and it seems to work ok, more reliable than the race trackers. Only issue tends to be whether the cell service gets generally overwhelmed meaning the person tracking can struggle to get real time updates from the airtag.
I tried it at Ironman Maryland and it didn’t get any signals on the ride for my wife. Boston and running may work better though.
Boston app has great text message notifications and if she takes the T (Train) she can see you along the route all morning and get ahead of you with at text to let her know where you are on the route after you cross the timing mat.
Interesting. It’s probably a safe assumption that everyone else will have their phones on them to help track you. The most accurate is going to be starting a Strava/Garmin live track with your phone on you or a Cellular watch if you have one.
Also tried this at IM Maryland and it was not great. It will give a few updates when the person is close enough to a iPhone but it is nothing like live tracking and the updates are infrequent.
I tried it at SG 70,3 WC, and dropped the tag in T1 trying to put it my my tri shorts pocket during the monsoon. My wife thought I was stuck in T1 for 30 mins til she saw bike splits on the IM tracker 🙂. But there was a happy ending, we tracked the tag post race to a big pile of lost and found items at the finish area! Can’t believe a volunteer picked it up and brought it back to finish.
All that being said, on a run course with spectators like Boston I think it would work well.
Makes sense that it wouldn’t work well for the IM-MD bike leg - since Airtags need to be close to iPhones to work, and that course is so remote/lacking in spectators, there aren’t many opportunities for it to ping/update to the network.
For Boston, since the course is more crowded from start to finish, I could see you having better luck with tracking because of more iPhones constantly around, though too many phones clogging up the network, as others mentioned, could definitely be an issue too.
I just checked Amazon and I can get a four pack for $99. Right now, I only need one for tracking and I believe I could reuse it, long term, for other valuables that I own. The others I may gift to either my kids or relatives. I agree that for Boston cell phone coverage should be excellent. If the network does get overloaded, I assume any other tracking device would have similar problem. I suppose one downside is that it can only be associated with one phone but for this event I’ll only have one person on-site that needs to find me. Everyone else can use the texting app from the race site.
I tried using them on a run in a suburban area ( I do not run with my Iphone). My wife received zero updates. I assume it was not picking up any Iphone signals along my route.