Road race goes high-tech

It’s official: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Peachtree Road Race is a 21st-century production.

For the first time in its 40-year history, the nation’s largest road race is going to treat all 55,000 participants the same way it has its elite runners. Race organizers announced Thursday that every runner will be electronically timed in the 6.2-mile race through Buckhead and Midtown on July Fourth.

Here’s how it will work: Everybody who runs will receive a ChronoTrack D-Tag, a lightweight, weatherproof strip that wraps around a runner’s shoelace and activates when he or she crosses the start line. The D-Tag, which is used only once, eliminates the need for race organizers to retrieve it after the race, and prevents the bottlenecks that would result in the finish line area if they tried to do so.

Until now, only the fastest runners —- those who were seeded or in what was referred to as “Time Group One” —- got electronic timing devices as part of their race kits.

Until this year, race organizers felt it was the only practical approach. “Even our timing company said this was not doable with the high volume of runners we have with the technology that’s been out there the last 10 years,” said Tracey Russell, executive director of the Atlanta Track Club. “It just wasn’t manageable.”

The track club tested D-Tags out in the Weather Channel Atlanta Marathon and Half Marathon in November before deciding it would work in the Peachtree. “We are the largest race using this technology,” Russell said. “There are several technologies out there, but we are the first one of our size using D-Tags.”

The other major improvement this year is that everybody will have the option to register for the race online. The first 45,000 runners will come from online registration that will become available March 15 at www.ajc.com/peachtree. Once those slots are filled, the final 10,000 runners will be selected by lottery from mail-in applications appearing in the March 22 editions of the Journal-Constitution. Only applications postmarked by March 31 will be considered.