twittering while running #bangultra

Being convinced about twitter's value to social networking and amazed at its simplicity, I have

been an advocate on spreading the news about twitter. I try to link important(and trivial stuff too) events in my life to twitter and running is a very important part of my life right now.

I have been using twitter to talk about my running as well - in fact the tool I am using to log my runs, dailymile.com has an integration to twitter which tweets my training details and notes out to twitter. Since I am a slow runner and do run-walk-run, I have some time in between to tweet how I feel and where I am for my friends on twitter to keep track. I am not great at SMS and I have an old fashioned phone which was a gift from brother-in-law, who doesn't seem to be interested in replacing it for me:)

I did twitter a bit  in the last Kavery Trail Marathon when I was feeling good and not nervous(in the begining).  I was using the SMS(text) integration with twitter which is charged at Rs.3/sms by the carrier. If you have internet connection, try the twitter mobile app  . For the Ultra, I used the hashtag "#bangultra" for all messages which can be searched via http://www.hashtags.org/tag/bangultra  (curiously, my final tweets are missing here). Typically this is done by a group of people so that their tweets on the same topic can be seen at one place. I should have at least let other twiterrados  known about it.

While this may be a pastime for slow runners like me, it can be really useful during events like this. The organizers can use the hashtag to send information to the participants and others, while participants can also chime in with their preparations, blog posts, pictures etc. about the event. In fact hashtags retrieve pictures, videos and blogs with the same keyword. It will also be great for the folks who are following the events as well. I came to know about another runner who twittered during the runs, but we weren't connected in twitter before the run.

For example, Santhosh's 24-hour effort could have been broadcasted via twitter - in fact we came to know how it went from his blog later. I also don't have any information about the 50K+ event results. It would have been great to get twitter updates from 15th evening to see how he was doing with his runs. That would have made things more interesting before we packed for the run and after we finished our runs. All event announcements also could have been broadcasted via twitter as well.

So event organizers, here is another great tool for you that can make the events far more interesting and can generate far more followers by the power of the simple tool - twitter!