[Update, April 21, 2009: The third RunKeeper video has now been posted.]
Maybe Jason Jacobs’ foot injury wasn’t quite as bad as he was suggesting last week. Just minutes ago the CEO of Boston-based FitnessKeeper, which makes a popular iPhone run-tracking application called RunKeeper, crossed the finish line of the Boston Marathon with a very respectable time of 3:55:07. Not bad for someone who’s battling a serious case of plantar fasciitis—and wearing a lycra iPhone costume.
As we explained Friday, Jacobs decided three weeks ago to run the marathon dressed as an iPhone as part of a social media campaign for RunKeeper organized by a group of Emerson College marketing communications undergraduates. The students are producing a series of viral Web videos about the marathon preparations; the second video came out last week, and a third, about the actual race, will appear sometime soon. [Update: the third video been posted here.]
The dramatic crux of the “Apprentice”-style videos is the team’s concern over Jacobs’ recurring foot injury, which prevented him from doing much training for the marathon. But given that Jacobs maintained a pace averaging 8 minutes 58 seconds per mile for 26.2 miles, and placed 14,217th in a field of more than 26,000, it would seem that his injury was not a massive impediment.
Jacobs, who raised more than $2,500 for the Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital as part of its “Race for Rehab” team, took the term “mobile computing” to heart during the race, using his iPhone to send out frequent updates about his progress. You can read the Twitter posts he pecked out here and see the runners’-eye-view pictures he uploaded to TwitPic here. You can also see the route of his run, as recorded by RunKeeper, here.
