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Ernesto Burden's avatar

Interesting observation. I don’t carry a phone with me during races or listen to music, so whatever pics come out of it are at the mercy of the race photographer. And I’ll acknowledge when I see people with selfie sticks narrating their progress, I get a little cognitive dissonance… like… wouldn’t you be faster if you really focused on running? On the other hand, I ran Boston 2014 less as a race and more of defiant FU to the fear that the bombing had inspired the year before (ran that day as well). In that 2014 race I ran with a beta pair of Google Glass sunglasses and recorded a lot of the course and my interactions with friends and other runners then cut it into a 15 minute video that got some 13,000 views. So absolutely get the compulsion to document and share things that feel epochal in my running life.

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Laura Fountain's avatar

Really enjoyed this. I ran Boston UK marathon last weekend. Just 800 runners and no live tracking. Like you, I’ve found it hard not to overthink things in big city marathons. I had an awful London Marathon in 2022 and the thought of people watching my tracker made it worse. My result in Boston wasn’t what I hoped but I was happy with my performance. Anyway, what I’ve always found in my own content is that people respond most when you’re honest and open about things going wrong, disappointments and bad results. So although there is that pressure to present perfect, actually that’s not what people want - they want genuine highs and lows.

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