Hi all, I just wanted to tell you about my new project, which goes live this Saturday with its first event. A little while ago I was playing around with the idea of bringing together a race series and the logistics of how it all went together. I was also doing a lot of paddling using my GPS watch to track my progress and speed. So I thought why not put the two together and so the GPS Challenge idea was born. I have now put together a website (www.gpschallenge.com.au) and we have a tried and tested race management system at the back of the website.

We are launching our first race this weekend. The format is pretty simple. Register on our website (in both the forum and the Race Management System), Log a GPS track over a 1km distance, upload your GPS track to the website (your GPS will need to allow this to happen). The race will remain open for a week. After that we will collate all the times and then post a leaders board on the website. Our intent is to run one race a month at this time. We hope, also to have a real world sprint race next year.

I know that people will talk about wind assistance or tide assistance, and they are right, however, we aren't racing for sheep stations. Our expectation is that people will be fairly honest when posting times. We do exclude downwinders. I am hoping that a few people will join us for our first race this week, allowing us to iron out any bugs that might exist in the process (lets be honest all IT related stuff ends up having bugs through it).

One last thing I would like to thank Laurie for giving me permission to post up on Seabreeze about the GPS Challenge.

I hope to see a heap of you joining us for our first event.

Great idea Greg. Would also love to see at 4 or 5km time trial section where start and finish are at the same point. I think the guys on the Sunshine Coast averaged over 10k/hr for that distance. Not sure anyone else has achieved that so I think it is the benchmark in Australia and was actually achieved over an out and back course so no tide or wind issues there. I think posting the GPS record is the only fair way of doing it as well.

Oh other thing is that yes Map My Run and RunKeeper will both allow you to post your link to your GPS time on the forum, we did some testing. Garminwill also allow it. As we go on we will test more GPS devices. We didnt want to limit people to a specific brand of GPS device so we are trying to make it as open as possible.

our first month will be a free event and then after that we are looking at either $2 or $3 per month to compete. This will work towards the covering of costs for hosting fees and stuff.

Actually Laurie did mention it, I was actually really suprised that the name was available to be honest, but we bought the site name a while before approaching Laurie in relation to mentioning the challenge on Seabreeze. Our intent is certainly not to get into the windsurfers space at all and we are trying to make ours a paddle orientated challenge. We were very careful as we didnt want to annoy anyone by mentioning the challenge on the breeze until we had gotten permission off Laurie to do so.

To be fair Nebbian, we didnt know about your site when we went down the path of building ours, Laurie alerted us to it after the name had been bought and the site had been all but completely constructed. We will be trying to limit human admin on the site as time goes by, but to start with I think it will be the only way to pull things together.

Nebbian, I appreciate your frustration but we are only focussing on paddling sports, not even specifically SUP. I would suggest that how we are going about our version of the challenge, is quite different to the way you are doing it. I appreciate the work you have done in bringing together the speed sailing crew. I hope there is room for both sites going forward. As you said you have been around for 6 years so we will just be the new kids on the block.

I don't get it, if you didn't want someone using a website name similar to yours with a similar idea you should of bought that name all those years ago also. That would of been the smart idea then you could control if you would sell the name to a similar concept or protect your site by not selling it on to them..

Peter yep we will accept GPS runs from anywhere, as to why it is saying forbidden I have no idea why it would be saying that. I will check with our tech guy, all I can think of is that it may be seeing something funky with your IP address perhaps.

This looks like a great idea/concept, cant wait to test out my runs.

For those who dont have a GPS the GPS app i use is Motion X, (trying not to hyjack) works very well, gives you a 3,2,1 count down to start, and talks to you while running giving you current and ave speed and distance traveled. You can share the track on the net (motiion X website). only thing is i have found that it sometimes takes a miss step e.g. my last run told me my max speed was 12.7kms no way i can do that. It also told me on a 2.75km paddle up river i went up 41m and down 36m which on a flat water paddle is impossible. other than that its pretty good. Could be a good thing to use if you dont have a GPS.

We are going to keep the challenge open for another week as we would love to get some more GPS tracks logged into our RMS. If anyone is up for it then go to www.gpschallenge.com.au and register on the Race Management System, then when you have done your 1km run put a screen shot or a link to your track up there. When we close the event we will be collating the times and then ranking them in the appropriate classes. Happy racing :)

I am hoping that somebody who owns one of the S.I.C. 16 standamarans is going to post a time/track on the GPS Challenge, so we can see how fast they really are. They look fast and the posts on them seem positive about how they paddle. It would be good to see a head to head comparison against a quality 14 foot racing board, to get a sense of how much faster they are than what most people are presently paddling. i.e. same paddler over the same 1km course, same conditions, on one board then on the other board.

Hi all

Just a quick reminder that GPS Challenge 02 starts on Saturday 09 November and will be open for 2 weeks. Hope to see a few people register to show us how fast they are. The time to beat from the last event was Jonesy smoking it up. Who will win this one?

Oh and also - I am using my Iphone and the RunKeeper app to log my paddles. It is a little clunky to use e.g start the app - put phone away - start paddling - stop paddling - get phone out - stop app etc etc. I feel like I am burning precious seconds doing this :P Oh well, I have been looking into the Garmin GPS watches, they look great. Will have to do some searching around for a good price etc.