The Tickers are Coming

Fueled by AI vibe-coding, another phenomenon this year’s Cocodona has surfaced is the arrival of the ‘text-based live ticker’ for trail races promising minute by minute updates. Josh Rosenthal from Borderlands teased a beta of his interpretation of this. As he puts it is:

This prototype was built almost entirely with modern AI tooling.

LoC is functional right now. It is not race-ready.

LoC stands for ‘Live on Course’ and promises:

People positioned throughout the course submit short field reports in real time about athlete condition, tactical shifts, weather, crew behavior, atmosphere, emotional moments, and developing race situations.

The system is designed around human moderation, verification, editorial judgment, and routing before information reaches commentators or viewers.

In the beginning of trail race media it was iRunFar that began covering trail race via posts shared on Twitter. For a long time this was the only way the fans at home could stay somewhat up to date with what was happening live on the course. This labor of love that iRunFar poured themselves into got crushed by the demise of Twitter and the incoming promise of better coverage via YouTube livestreams and Instagram reels. Twitter is still cooked and won’t be coming back as a tool to share information and gather a community, the Instagram algorithm has become unusable, and yet the livestreams haven’t proven to provide the access to information as superfans had hoped for. The livestreams capture the community and share the vibe, but often the actual race updates are getting lots amidst the casual banter about what shoes the runners wear and what food someone might eats at the next aid station.

For Cocodona this year several folks vibe-coded dashboards promising updates in ticker form, all running into the same issue: to provide updates you gotta actually be awake, online and locked in to collect and share the information – not an easy task.

Back ins 2024 after Cocodona and for the second anniversary of Electric Cable Car I wrote:

I’ll be in Silverton for Hardrock 100 this year. First time for me and I’m stoked. How will I cover the event for Electric Cable Car? Stay tuned! But it won’t be the usual “here are a bunch of interviews with athletes” format. I’m working on a new and unique angle – hope you’ll enjoy what I’m cooking up.

The Hardrock media coverage will be a test case for what I am trying to do for Chamonix during UTMB week. I’ll be there and I am working on a strategy for this week that’s informed by what experiences I gain covering Hardrock while also acknowledging that I won’t be arriving in the Alps with a team of people and a truck full of gear. Heck, I still gotta run OCC too, right?

The results of this test: it’s fucking hard. If you’re on the ground at an event it’s just so incredibly challenging to find time to pull yourself away to posts updates. If you’re remote you’re relying on other accounts to drop that info, and everything you do will be second hand. Then last year for Cocodona I made another attempt. I tried myself on providing this service and launched ECC Live, a ticker, leaderboard and human-curated collection of updates from the race. The only AI code on the page was the race clock I added. I’ve learned some valuable lessons, retooled it for the WMTRC in the fall of 2025 and tried this again for Cocodona this year.

The updated results: It’s still fucking hard, it’s still a human problem foremost, to gather the information and share it in a timely fashion – AI can’t help with that (yet).

Trail doesn’t have an ESPN, or Kicker (German soccer website), or whatever your favorite sports app is you visit to get your real time updates of your favorite team/athlete/sport.

• The YouTube livestreams are fun, but unsuitable for information sharing.
• The Instagram algorithm is dead for timely information.
• The live trackers are too spotty and unreliable to be the only source of truth.
• The race directors are too busy organizing an actual event to update their race websites during race weekend with links and information to results.

But, what all these live tickers that springing up tell me is that there’s something ‘there’. Someone is going to crack this, and at some point in the very near future. What a fun time to be in trail media.