Personalized Marathon Training Plan Guide
Preparing for a marathon requires a systematic training plan. RunBox AI coach creates a customized 16-20 week marathon training plan based on your fitness level, goal time, and available training time.
Why Choose an AI-Customized Marathon Training Plan?
- Personalized Assessment: Based on your running experience and fitness condition
- Smart Adjustments: Training intensity optimizes automatically with progress
- Scientific Pacing: Based on your target finish time
- Injury Prevention: Reasonable intensity progression to avoid injuries
race photographer behind the scenes 1: marathon photography starts with event announcement
This article will be a long series.
It is expected to have 10-12 parts; this is the first part.
Due to the need to discuss matters, there will be few pictures and more substantial content.
Please understand.
When an event is announced, news photographers first get involved, starting with the pre-race press conference and subsequent promotional video shooting, production, and promotion. This is part of the pre-race publicity phase. This phase may seem easy, but it is not as fun and enjoyable as one might imagine.
Take a nationally renowned event in April as an example. The press conference is held around October of the previous year. After the press conference, photographers and videographers work together to shoot a series of promotional videos for the event. The final video may only be 10 seconds to 10 minutes long, but it requires shooting about 10-50 hours of video footage, followed by post-editing, special effects, dubbing, music, and subtitles. But let's not talk about that now.We will only discuss the photography and videography part, which is the main focus of this article..
After October, the temperature in the Yangtze River Basin gradually drops, but the event is in April. Therefore, the entire photography and videography team must create a warm and vibrant spring environment for the participating athletes. The athletes also have to wear summer sportswear in relatively low temperatures to run and appear joyful and sweaty. For a specific shot in a particular scene, photographers and videographers need to set up the camera, arrange the equipment, and wait quietly until the desired moment appears and then quickly capture it.
These photographers and videographers design scripts, layouts, scenes, environments, and actions according to requirements. They shoot repeatedly and make corrections until they achieve the desired effect. Sometimes, a single shot may need to be taken dozens of times, or even more than a hundred times in extreme cases.
After such torment, the promotional video you see a few days after the press conference is the result of different teams and participants working tirelessly, shooting a large amount of footage on-site, and staying up all night editing and rendering. A seemingly small promotional video of a few dozen seconds may have gone through many days and nights of continuous work.
Coincidentally, I have also participated in such shoots. Even in the cold winter, participants wore short sleeves and shorts with warm patches and down jackets, running and shooting repeatedly. Sitting on the cold ground, holding the equipment and focusing on capturing the necessary footage. This is not as simple as a 6-hour and 15-minute marathon; it could be 20, 30, or 40 hours of continuous shooting.
Compared to marathon coverage, shooting pre-race promotional videos is much more complex.
Before the race, there are not only event promotional videos but also sponsor promotional videos and various brand promotional videos and posters.
These videos need to focus on the theme of the marathon, including the event theme, time, route, city highlights, and other elements, and invite popular athletes to participate in the shooting. The difficulty lies in the fact thatmany athletes are not actors or models and do not know what you need. You have to constantly tell them what you need, how you need them to pose, their expressions, actions, angles, makeup, etc.And you must complete the shooting within the specified time, smoothly enter the post-editing and retouching stage, and deliver the final product on time. Otherwise, you're in trouble.
During this process, the most challenging part for photographers and videographers is the preparation, adjustments, on-site control, and the massive workload of post-editing and retouching. They work day and night without rest to meet the high standards of the promotional video.
In addition to promotional videos, there are various pre-race event shoots.
You know about the Bunny Training Camp, right? How could such an event lack photographers and videographers? First, there are on-site recording positions responsible for documenting the actual training status of each participant for evaluation during the event. Then there are news shooting positions that need to capture the atmosphere and highlight photos for later publicity.
Then there are the mobile phones in everyone's hands. During training breaks, they take a large number of on-site photos, which is a concrete manifestation of public participation. For such events, we usually start following up from the first day of the event.For events lasting two or three days, we participate throughout and produce photos in real-time.In other words, while carrying a camera, you also need to bring a computer (obviously, which photographer doesn't bring a computer when working?).
In fact, compared to marathon coverage, it is now rare to need a computer for shooting. At least for the last two events I shot, I didn't use a computer much. Since it's not needed, I naturally travel light without it.
However, for events like the Bunny Training Camp, you must bring a computer. You might need to start selecting and editing photos just 10 minutes after finishing a training session. Sometimes, right after pressing the shutter, you might be lying on the trackside, opening your computer to start editing. Once you finish editing and send the photo to the event organizers, it might appear as the headline of a news article on everyone's phones within minutes.
So,for such events, speed, accuracy, and stability are crucial..
*Photographer Tommy is sharing his experience
If I were to elaborate on pre-race event shooting, I could talk for three days and nights about the fun experiences. But due to space limitations, we can only briefly touch on it. We'll find another opportunity to chat about it; it's really fun and full of happy moments. So, let's wrap up the topic of pre-race press conferences and events for now and return to the topic of coverage shooting.
Tomorrow, we'll discuss how coverage shooting preparations begin. Tomorrow's content will be quite intense!
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I am a racecourse photographer.
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