On Sunday, I’m running the Barcelona Marathon, it’s my 7th race of this distance and the second time on the course. A couple of weeks back I started thinking back to my previous experience to try and recall the route and most of my recollection was mostly anecdotal and of course I only have photos of the start and the finish line, probably the two best parts of any race but they don’t necessarily provide context of what the race was actually like.
INSTAGRAM: Pre race #groupie #marathon #maratobarcelona #barcelona
One thing I did have was a GPS trace of the route taken from my phone via Strava last year. That said Strava didn’t really have what I was looking for (more on that and my thought process in the future).
My ideal feature list was as follows.
- Need to be able to see my race split times.
- A direct result of that is having an ETA so my girlfriend can prepare as a Spectator.
- An overview of the elevation during the course.
- The ability to change units and have quarter mile segments, something I use to pace myself during the race.
- Some basic interactivity.
- A process I can repeat for other marathons or races.
With Tableau and Alteryx, I set about creating a visualisation In summary, I used Alteryx to do some light spatial analysis and quickly prepare the data, then Tableau to do some dynamic calculations and build a visualisation. Post race I’ll analyse the race and go a little deeper into the full process but for now… here it is. Click image to explore and calculate your splits.
Click image to view the visualization