If your organization is focusing on DEI and wants to reach beyond the pack of runners and walkers who fill up traditional races, Racery’s got you covered.
Now Racery’s virtual race participants can also convert many, many other activities into miles on our virtual routes. These inclusive activity conversions are perfect for companies and charities with a commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI.)
As an alternative to logging actual miles walked or run, racers can pick from three conversion models as they’re logging an activity. (The race sponsor gets to add or subtract activities!)
First, and most simply, a racer can log the time (minutes or hours) that she’s engaged in activity in broad categories of moderate (yoga, weights, etc) or vigorous (cardio, HIIT, spinning, etc) exercise.
Second, the racer can log the number of miles she’s just walked or run.
Racers can easily convert activity minutes or hours into virtual race milesFinally, the racer can opt to log the time spent on a specific fitness activity. See the image at right for an example of how this works. Note that this function is invisible until a race actually starts!
Because we’re trying to create an even playing field that makes the race fun for all participants, Racery’s proprietary activity conversions are based on a translation of activity time into steps into miles. Thus, an hour of moderate cycling will register as 4.83 miles on the route, while the same period of breaststroke will register as 5.14 miles. The conversions appear extremely precise but are in fact (necessarily!) fuzzy — there is as yet no way to affordably and scientifically equate all these activities, particularly because we can’t gauge the intensity with which an individual has exercised.
Obviously, cyclists usually physically cover far more real ground and swimmers cover less water, but our conversion strategy means roughly equal effort translates into roughly equal virtual distances on the route.
If you use a step counter while you are intentionally walking or running, just enter those as steps and we’ll convert them too!
And if you’re sponsoring a race and want to add or subtract exercises or activities, we’ve got a conversion dashboard that lets you do that. For example in this race, stairs climbed are converted into progress on a 100-mile virtual climb of Mount Everest. We’ve also seen some sponsors give credit for watching a financial literacy video, playing with the kids, drying dishes, or memorizing Bible verses.
Here’s the list of the convertible activities in a typical race. (The conversions are proprietary.) Note that every race is different, because race sponsors can add or subtract activities for conversion!
