How It Works

MARATHON KIDS UK IN SCHOOLS

When children enrol in school, they are allocated a unique pupil number. The Marathon Kids UK ‘Digital Tracking System’ (DTS) simply uses this number to match the child to distance completed, all safely logged on the system.

Children complete laps of a course either on the school playground or field, scanning a QR Code for every lap completed. The distance each child accumulates is automatically uploaded onto the schools DTS at the end of the session, showing the total distance each budding athlete has clocked up over the course of the programme.

Our Marathon Kids are given the annual challenge of completing four marathons in an academic year, a feat many achieve, with some going far beyond this.

MARATHON KIDS UK IN PARKS

When children come to our park sessions, they run on a 250 metre course set up by our amazing volunteers. They collect a ‘lap band’ for every lap they run and put this on their wrist. Each lap band is equal to the distance of the course.

Once running has finished children count the number of lap bands they have collected, this tells them how far they have run in that session. This distance is added to their personal profile on the Marathon Kids UK App which is held by each child’s parent/guardian.

There are 10 marathon medals for our Marathon Kids to collect over their lifetime via the programme.

More than 140,000 children have benefited from the programme over the past 10 years.  During the 2019/20 academic year our Marathon Kids ran more than 365,000km together.