Garmin PacePro map design

[UK_Disney_Dopey_Hopeful]

Afternoon Y'all

im taking part in Dopey 2024 and was after a little advice

This year i invested in a Fenix 7 (Garmin) and it has been sensational for my running. The best feature ive used is PacePro. For those not familiar to it, you can upload a route to your watch, tell it what time/pace you want to go round in and it will tell you if youre ahead or behind of your schedule throughout that course

This got me thinking (Dangerous i know!).... will there be anybody on here who will upload the 4 runs of marathon weekend onto Garmin so that others can download them?

I took part in the 2022 Dopey challenge and by mile 17 of the marathon i was about done. I managed to jog it home but i never enjoyed the last 9 miles because i was constantly worried about how close the balloon ladies might be (As it was i finished in 5:15).

So im thinking perhaps if i downloaded each course, set my goal time to be 16 minute miles, the watch would give me a much more accurate time of how im performing with regards the sweep. Any thoughts/comments on this would be much appreciated and has anybody used this before, and if so, how did you find it for yourselves?

 

[camaker]

Afternoon Y'all

im taking part in Dopey 2024 and was after a little advice

This year i invested in a Fenix 7 (Garmin) and it has been sensational for my running. The best feature ive used is PacePro. For those not familiar to it, you can upload a route to your watch, tell it what time/pace you want to go round in and it will tell you if youre ahead or behind of your schedule throughout that course

This got me thinking (Dangerous i know!).... will there be anybody on here who will upload the 4 runs of marathon weekend onto Garmin so that others can download them?

I took part in the 2022 Dopey challenge and by mile 17 of the marathon i was about done. I managed to jog it home but i never enjoyed the last 9 miles because i was constantly worried about how close the balloon ladies might be (As it was i finished in 5:15).

So im thinking perhaps if i downloaded each course, set my goal time to be 16 minute miles, the watch would give me a much more accurate time of how im performing with regards the sweep. Any thoughts/comments on this would be much appreciated and has anybody used this before, and if so, how did you find it for yourselves?

It seems like just ensuring you're averaging better than a 16 min/mile pace would be a whole lot less effort than trying to set up PacePro if the sweep is what you're worried about. It seems like your fear of the balloon ladies is a bit misplaced, as well. You don't say what corral you started in, but even if you started side by side with them you finished ~1:45 ahead of them. If you were in any other corral, you likely were more than 2 hours ahead of them at the finish!

 

[Herding_Cats]

If you run with your phone, there is a significantly easier way to do what you want to do.

When runner tracking goes "live" and you can put in info to track people, you put in both your name and bib information and that of the 7hr pacers. There are "email" tags you can use depending on what cell phone carrier you are using, so that the "email" just goes to your phone as a text.

Some people will say to "track the balloon ladies, but they don't publicly publish their information (safety/privacy reasons) but the 7hr pacers start just a few minutes ahead of the balloon ladies. Then, if you've set it up correctly, you will get text alerts when you go over a timing mat, and when the pacer(s) you are tracking go over that mat you will get another text alert. And then you can compare the the 2 times and know how far ahead you are. This also works if you are trying to catch up with someone who started sooner than you.

As the race goes on (I feel like this is easier when you are more than half way) you can do some rounding and simple math to figure out what the slowest you can go for the remainder of the race would be.

I'll add in some screen shots of what this looks like.

 

[Herding_Cats]

Ok. So screen shots. Dennis Holler has been the 7hr pacer for the last couple of years, but you can find out who the pacers are at the jeff Galloway booth at the expo, or in most of the fb groups, and the list is usually shared in here as well. The ONLY things that are important here are the time stamps and that it’s the same timing mat. I don’t care about pace or estimated finish times. Both the person I was running with and I received our tracking texts in less than a minute of passing the timing mats (minus a few of the ones at the very beginning of the race) so I wasn't concerned about lag in alert times either.


So at mile 20 I was approximately 22min ahead of the pacers/balloon ladies.

And now comes the herding_cats version of runners math:

We have 6.2 miles to go, 22min ahead comes out to between 3 and 4 minutes per mile (6mi x 3 = 18 and 6mi x 4 = 24) and it’s really going to be more than 6.2mi with weaving and any stops we make, so round down to 3 to be conservative. We could have completed the race at 19min/mi pace (7hr pacers keep an 16min mile + 3min per mile buffer) and been just fine. So we walked more, stopped to stretch our hamstrings in the shade after BB parking lot, etc.

I find it’s also helpful to turn off auto lap and manually lap at each mile marker because I have covered more than 27mi in both of my Disney marathons.

 

[GreatLakes]

As the race gets closer you'll most likely find a public version of each race to download. If not they are pretty easy to make. I used PacePro for the 2022 marathon and have used it for every race I've run with a time goal.

If there isn't a public map as the races get closer bump this thread and I'll get some made and shared. A friend of mine is doing Dopey and will likely ask me for them anyway.

 

[FFigawi]

Wouldn’t it be easier to set the Virtual Partner on your watch to your target pace? This way you’ll know exactly how far ahead or behind you are without having to do any math while in the middle of the race.