Ten thousand steps and more. The first weekend of March, the Paris half-marathon, which usually brings together some 40,000 runners, was once again postponed, to September 7, due to the Covid-19 epidemic. It had been canceled a year earlier, a few days before the first confinement. The Paris marathon is scheduled for October 17. To keep runners patient, the company organizing these two events, Amaury Sport Organization (ASO), organized a connected marathon on March 6 and 7.
They were 8,000 to take up the challenge. Among them, Christophe, a 52-year-old journalist, who has already run a dozen marathons, from Paris to Berlin via New York, and his childhood friend, also named Christophe, who lives in Belgium. The two often team up “for real”. In practice, they registered as a duo on a free application created for the event. Each entered the number of kilometers he wanted to cover, without constraint of place or time, but on condition that it was within the allotted weekend. At the “finish”, the challenge was met, they had a good performance: their team, called The Running Stones, finished 70e by covering the 21 km in 1 h 29 min. “Even if you run alone, you have the impression of participating in a collective race, it’s a challenge and it motivates”, explains Christophe, who tempers however: “It does not replace the magical side of the race, the atmosphere, the collective experience. “ Appointment is made for the Rotterdam marathon, on October 23 and 24.
Go to the moon
To motivate athletes – and the less athletic – more and more events are organized in a connected way, due to the health crisis. Thus the French Federation of Cardiology (FFC) launched the Connected Heart Routes, the event, which usually brings together 800,000 people, having had to be canceled for the second year in a row. Each day, the participants in this challenge enter the number of kilometers covered by walking, cycling, running, the objective being to go to… the Moon, ie to cross 384,400 kilometers. 174,808 kilometers had been traveled on Tuesday morning April 6. It works individually, as a team … “It’s a way of maintaining the event and raising awareness of physical activity”, explains Professor Alain Furber, president of the FFC. Connected objects are, according to this specialist, very useful for “cardiac patients” in order to study their heart rate, or even to detect possible arrhythmias (arrhythmias).
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