The various, non-mainstream sports tend to be factionalized. These sports work virtually independent of others, where they comprise their own communities. From the uber-elite athlete, like an ultramarathoner, down to the avid runner, there’s a commonality that does exist, when it comes to looking for that next challenge to individually push themselves. Of those that now compete in triathlons, a strong number of them have played more traditional sports leading up to this new athletic pursuit. Endurance sports provide them another vehicle to maintain their competitive nature at a different stage of life.
Domestically, participation levels have steadily increased over the last few years. The Sports and Fitness Industry Association (SFIA) notes in their 2014 report that boomers and generation X prefer fitness sports at 62 percent and 67 percent, respectively. Meanwhile, in Europe–specifically in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Spain–there’s even greater such activity.
The wave of wearables and smartphones has enabled endurance sports athletes to remain on, in terms of information, be it physiological or externally-based. A digital hub does serve its purpose to develop this community, where tracking results, calendar of events, and monitoring personal fitness levels. Startup Swim.com exemplifies what could work in this space, tailored directly for the swimming community. These target users are not necessarily the most technologically inclined, but enough to value its ecosystem to assist them with their respective training and performance.
Accordingly, Beat Your Mark (BYM), a Spain-based startup, believes that triathletes haven’t had a platform designed to to keep their personal sports CV and plans for future seasons. They have developed a database to house the needs of multi-discipline sports athletes across the spectrum. Two of the original drivers for the creation of BYM comes from its “Comparator” and “What If” features; the former is a tool that allows cross-comparisons between users to aid performance and the latter is a barometer that projects scores that could have potentially been realized. On top of these features, 14,000 races and 15 million data points–race results, in this case–from around the world are registered inside the medium.
Beat Your Mark’s Founder, Federico Rodriguez Cerdá, mentions to SportTechie that at present time, a triathlon world record does not exist. This reality could be predicated to the fact that there hasn’t been a tool with the capability to standardize tracks and conditions.
Now, however, their patented BYM Coordinates facilitates for every triathlon or endurance sport race to receive one coordinate per discipline, which typifies the rigor of that particular discipline. This feature is of significant consequence due to the opportunity to open up possibilities towards finding races, score leagues, and standardization of results.
Currently, BYM is active in its native Spain, where north of 2,500 races are scheduled per season. The platform has started to gain traction as the home for athletes’ races and results, largely from those who partake in races taking places in other countries and regions.
In the United States, though, triathletes are more used to competing in varied kinds of multi-disciplinary sports, like ironman and others, during a single season. BYM’s database allows Americans to look at races they may want to compete in, how they fare in a given race, and build their own curriculum.
To develop this software and make this infrastructure possible, Cerdá informs that they began with a back-office engine that lets them convert any source of result into a format compatible to use with BYM. The search component was then built to allow users to find events and other athletes as well as create comprehensive individual profiles to form their athletic record. The applications part were last, bearing in mind that it intends to be utilized during an athlete’s season and review past performances.
“One of the biggest issues is that athletes needed to go to different websites to find everything they needed to plan their season, and even analyze their previous season’s results. BYM brings a standardized format and simplifies the process; hence, reducing the most valuable asset for our users: time,” says Cerdá.
In light of this problem, BYM’s main focus dovetails creating a clean, and easy-to-use platform. They never want athlete to have to “learn” how to use BYM. So, its simplicity and practical usefulness–as intuitive as possible on both fronts–would be the underlying pillars for adoption and retention.
Still, the aforementioned 14,000 races and 15 million data points didn’t filter on their own or autonomously. BYM had to manually input all of that information. Every result within the same format, with the chance to tinker the data in order to take performance conclusions. Having implemented these facets, the platform supports numerous brands with information about the athletes–somewhat in the same vein as NYC startup OpenSponsorship–for sponsoring and tracking options, too.
BYM, thus, is modular; and the platform is based on the user’s chosen sport and personal likes and dislikes. Everything hones in on building the user’s athletic CV. The level of personalization is at the user, club, and sporting body level.
The core of BYM stems from and relies upon its difficulty ratings patent that they acquired.
This first one emphasizes on being able to weigh courses and their segments insofar as handicapping athletes. This functionality creates a better construction of a matrix to predict performance based on real world data, including environmental intel. BYM acquired this patent by allowing individual users to maintain personal performance statistics; and, in turn, collectively compare scores from each user to determine and update difficulty ratings for numerous competitions. Rating are defined for each leg of a given course; and the medium lets users predict their respective performance on an unfamiliar course based on course ratings and the user’s historical performance on other courses.
For instance, some endurance athletes might like a course that is higher in altitude and temperature above 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Athletes and trainers can then choose competitions that best suit them, and organizers can put on contests that can be targeted toward the top amateurs or athletes.
BYM have a few other patent applications in the process, which should be secured in the coming months. These ventures are focused on some applications of the current platform’s features, with some pertinent to mobile devices as well.
Conversely, there are three primary stakeholders that benefit from BYM beyond the athletes, themselves: trainers, event organizers, and equipment manufacturers.
“For trainers, it allows tracking results of disciplines, tracking competitors, and analyzing their performance and evolution. It also gives trainers a single environment from training to competition cycles and rates the athletes and tracks,” Cerdá states.
The What If feature, for example, allows trainers to see if an athlete was faster in the swim portion and how that would have changed the final result.
As it pertains to event organizers, BYM’s backend utilities assist them in knowing user’s evolution and improvement, traced back to their origins. The patented BYM Coordinates helps them design specific tracks that provided added value to a range of competitors. It also gives them the ability to rate courses and divide track segments.
And for equipment manufacturers, BYM represents a lone environment that amateur and pro athletes can give real feedback on the equipment they use for training and competitions.
Now that BYM has established a presence in Boston–the same stomping grounds of CoachUp— for international expansion, Cerdá points to leagues, colleges, and event organizers as key targets for them to introduce and rollout their platform in the States. The series of widgets, again, should be compelling for these parties in order to keep their own respective systems and control new participants.
Additionally, BYM is planning on sponsoring some top athletes to be ambassadors for their medium, which has already garnered a good track record among those in Europe. Some of them are even leveraging it to prepare to qualify for the world championships held in Chicago later this year. It’s another form of exposure for its visibility across America.
As it relates to the cohesion between software and hardware, Cerdá clarifies BYM’s role in the landscape: “Wearables are focused performance, while we focus on before and after race performance. Instead of building our own, we plan to integrate with companies that have similar open platforms. We are not interested in how consumers access the data, but, rather, their accessibility to it.”
Beat Your Mark is privately funded by an investor with over 15 years in tech investments. Although it’s nebulous around its monetization model, future financing rounds will delve into parties that can bring more to the table for its scalability to be viable across different markets, not so much on quantum monetary means.
Under Armour’s announcement during this year’s Consumer Electronics Show poses ripple effects throughout the fitness industry, with BYM building out its platform from European territories initially–including a multi-year partnership with one of the largest triathlon clubs in the Spanish Federation–then in the United States for the entire endurance athletic community.