You may remember Tom from his coaching session a few years ago about how he went from a 15-year lay off from running to become one of the most competitive senior masters runners in the country, and how you can stay healthy and competitive as you age.
PacePal is a service that lets you find others that run at or near the same pace as you during training and racing, so that you can find training partners both close to home and while you are traveling. In this 5 minute discussion, we talk about the history of PacePal and some of the cool new features that are coming out in early 2011 that you are going to want to keep your eye on:
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Blaine: Hi! I’m here with Tom Ryan, who is the founder of PacePal, which is a great website. It’s a Facebook application that lets you go in and find people in your community that run at the same pace as you, or if you’re traveling, it lets you find people you can run with while you’re in a new city.
So Tom, why don’t you tell us a little bit about how PacePal came about and a little bit of its history?
Tom: Well thanks Blaine! Thanks for inviting me to do this!
Back in 2004, I ran the Boston Marathon and when that was over, I realized that what allowed me to run it well was having friends to train with prior to the race.
You know that living in the Northeast, an April marathon presents all kinds of challenges due to winter running. So I was able to get through the winter by running with a bunch of different people, and it really helped me.
So that was one part of what got PacePal, or at least the seed, put in my head, but the other one was at the race itself.
Standing at the line I was searching for somebody who had the same race goal that I had. I’ve found it problematic to find somebody who had that same race objective as me. So I was thinking that during the race. I was saying, “Geez! Wouldn’t it be cool if there was some way to get people to connect before the race so that they could work out the logistics of training and getting to the race together, then running the race together.”
It started way back in 2004, and that’s when I’ve reserved the website, PacePal.com, and it just took me a while, because I’m not a programmer. It took me a while to figure out what I really wanted to have built, and to find a partner, which I have. His name is David Cannon. He’s another Masters Runner. He lives in Seattle, and he also has a software company.
So the two of us got together and decided that it was a project that we’ve wanted to take on together, and we launched in August of this year, and it’s really started to take hold.
Blaine: That’s great!
So you have a feature in there for finding other people that run in the same race as you?
Tom: Currently, our version of the product allows for one on one connections.
I can find you to run with in a location, if you were near me or in the location that I wanted to run at.
Come January, we’re going to be rolling out the next version which allows for groups to form and manage their social content among the group through our website, and events/races. That functionality will be up.
And yes, you’ll be able to find a PacePal for a major race, and to me, that is going to be cool. That is going to be a lot of fun.
Blaine: Yes! That will be neat!
So how many different areas do you currently have good PacePal groups, so far?
Tom: Couple of things respond to that. We really haven’t marketed yet.
We really haven’t tried to aggressively build membership.
Portland, Maine is home for me and has built up pretty well.
The Northwest, where David is, there’s a good concentration of PacePals there, but we’re seeing places like Manhattan, starting to populate. Chicago, Florida, Southern California…if you look at the PacePal map of where people live, they are scattered throughout the whole US, but those market are starting to pick up. So that’s kind of fun.
We’re also joint venturing with a firm who does the race registration for Beach to Beacon and a bunch of other races. So his race registration process will have the PacePal functionality built into it.
So when he’s done processing all the race applications, we’ll be able to send emails out to the race registrants and say, “Here’s a group of folks who have the same race goal as you. You might want to reach out to them to talk about training, nutrition, day of race activities and things like that. Or you can run in the race together.”
We have a lot of things in work. The next years going to be pretty exciting for us.
Blaine: That sounds like a lot of fun!
So if people want more info on PacePal, they just go to PacePal.com?
Tom: PacePal.com will get them there.
The application currently sits in Facebook. So if they go to PacePal.com it points them into Facebook. Or if you’re already in Facebook, in the search line just type in PacePal and it’ll pop right up.
Blaine: Very neat! Well thanks a lot Tom.
If you happen to need someone to run with, or if you’re traveling, I certainly recommend hopping on to the application and adding it and taking a look around. And you might find that some of your friends are already using it.
And if not, you should get some friends from your area to sign up, and start a new community in your area.
Tom: Very good! Hey Blaine, thanks a lot! I appreciate it!
You can check out PacePal for yourself by searching for it on Facebook or by going directly to their website at: http://www.pacepal.com
I finally managed to catch up with my friend, Tom Ryan, to talk to him for a few minutes on camera about a really cool new service that he’s developed called PacePal.
Sounds like a great program. I went to sign up for it and was disappointed that the “Get started” link took me to a Facebook application. While I use Facebook, I don’t trust Facebook. I never sign up for anything that requires a Facebook login. I have more faith in the little guy who probably has little to no security methods in place than I have for Facebook. So, until that is fixed, I won’t be using their service.
There are some non-facebook centric options coming soon, but right now it is a facebook application so that’s the only way to use it until those new features are released.
Thanks -- just signed up… but since I’m out of town visiting for a couple weeks, wondering if I should enter that zip code to find people here for the trip?? hmmm…. 🙂
That’s one of the best uses for it!