Twin Cities Marathon Recap

Last weekend we launched VegaLoop at the Twin Cities Marathon. We went to launch a product. What we will remember is the runners.

To every finisher

Congratulations. You did it.

Some of you ran your first marathon on Sunday. Some of you set a PR you had been chasing for years, and some of you had a day that went sideways at mile 18 and finished anyway. Every one of those finishes counts the same to us. The 10 Mile and the half count too. A start line in October means months of early alarms, long runs in August heat, and a lot of meals planned around training. Crossing the finish is the moment all of that pays off.

We got to hear a small piece of those stories at the booth. Each pace band we printed started with a conversation: a goal time, a race, and usually a little about how the training block went. One runner wanted to break four hours for the first time. Plenty just wanted to reach the last 10K with something left in their legs.

We printed hundreds of bands over two days. Each one was built for the course you were actually running, with splits adjusted for the hills instead of spread evenly over 26.2 miles. Seeing them on wrists Sunday morning was the best part of our weekend. We hope they helped, even a little.

Take the rest. You earned it.

To the pacers

The Twin Cities Marathon pacers are 30 volunteers who run the race for everyone except themselves. They hold a steady pace for hours, carry a sign the whole way, and do the mile-by-mile math so the runners around them can stop thinking and just run.

MPR News followed several of them on race day, and the story is worth your time. Some were pacing for the first time. Some had paced close to a hundred races. One is a math professor, which helps on a job that is mostly mental math at race pace. At mile 17, they were still out front, pulling their groups along.

One photo stopped us. A pacer is pointing to the band on her wrist, and it is one of ours. The dots mark the miles with a bathroom and the arrows show which miles go up or down. Seeing a pacer trust our band to carry a whole group to their goal is something we will not forget.

One of the pacers summed up the job better than we could: “I get more out of running as a pacer than crossing the line at Boston.” That is a pacer’s whole philosophy in one sentence. Your finish matters more to them than their own.

To every pacer out there on Sunday: thank you. You are awesome.

What runners asked for

Between bands, we asked almost everyone the same question. What would make VegaLoop more useful to you? The answers covered a lot of ground, but one came up more than any other. Runners wanted COROS support.

Plenty of the people we talked to train with a COROS watch, and until now their runs had no way into VegaLoop. That matters a lot to us. The whole point of the platform is that training, nutrition, and recovery live in one place, and when your runs can’t get in, the picture is missing half its story. We wrote about why syncing your watch with your nutrition changes what the data can tell you.

So we bought one

We like to dogfood what we build. Reading API documentation is one thing. Strapping on the watch, going for a run, and watching that run land next to the day’s meals is how we find out whether an integration actually works.

So we bought a COROS and started training with it. It is on our wrist for our own training now, and its runs flow into the same VegaLoop accounts we use every day. When something is rough, we feel it first.

COROS support is in beta

COROS support is live today as a beta, and it is open to everyone. There is no waitlist and no sign-up form. It is part of every VegaLoop plan, including the free account, so you don’t need to upgrade to use it.

It works the same way as our other watch integrations. Connect your COROS once, and your workouts sync into VegaLoop on their own. Your runs land in the same site as your meals, and your goals pick up the progress.

We are shipping it as a beta because we would rather get it into your hands than polish it behind closed doors. Our public beta taught us that real people using something every day find problems no test plan will. Every watch model, firmware version, and sport mode sends a slightly different shape of data, and the only way to see all of them is to let runners use it.

It will stay in beta for a little while as we kick the tires. Expect it to get better week by week. A missing workout: those are exactly the reports we want, and you can send them through our contact page.

Built for the runners

This feature exists because you told us you wanted it, some of you at the booth while a band was printing and some in a note after the race. We showed up at Twin Cities to be there for the runners. Building what you asked for is how we keep showing up.

Connect your watch, take an easy recovery run when your legs are ready, and let us know how it feels.