Privacy policy

LA100 is sponsored and administered by Big Run Media, LLC, doing business as Believe in the Run, 907 S. Eaton St., Baltimore, MD 21224, together with its program partner Featherstone Nutrition, Ltd. Between them they decide what this site collects and why, which makes them the ones responsible for your information. Tahosa Systems LLC built this platform and runs it for them, and handles your information only on their instruction.

ASICS supports the program as its shoe and apparel partner. As the Official Rules say, your application information, including your name and contact details, is shared with ASICS for use in connection with the program and as described in ASICS's own privacy policy. A few people at ASICS also have view-only access to this platform, where applicants and runners appear under sample names. The Los Angeles Marathon is the race; it has no access to this platform.

Everything on the application form, which is:

• ·Your name, your email address, and the city or town you live in.
• ·Your phone number, if you give one. It is optional.
• ·Your age.
• ·Dietary restrictions, and anything you add about how you eat.
• ·How you identify, if you choose to answer. The question is optional, self-reported, and never used to score an application. We ask so we can see whether this team reflects the running community.
• ·Your running history: whether you have run a marathon, how many, your personal record, whether you have run Los Angeles before, a recent race you are happy to be paced from, and which training group you want.
• ·The sports and activities you do, your running club, and any running brands you are an ambassador for.
• ·Three written answers: why you want this race, what you would bring to the team, and a challenge you are excited to take on.
• ·Whether you are open to sharing your training on social media, and your handles if you are.
• ·Your mailing address and your top, bottom, and shoe sizes. These only matter if you are selected.
• ·That you accepted the waiver, and the moment you accepted it.
• ·Whether you asked us to text you about your application, and the moment you asked.

We do not ask for your height or weight on the application form. Those are collected later, and only from the hundred women who are selected, because that is the only point at which they are used for anything.

Alongside your answers we keep our own working notes: the status of your application, which training group we think you fit, and the scores and comments our readers give you.

Once you accept a place you build a runner profile, and that is where the rest comes from:

• ·Your height and weight. Meghann's fueling guidance is calculated in grams per kilogram of body weight, so these are working numbers rather than a demographic question.
• ·Your dietary restrictions, your notes about how you eat, and the fuel you prefer on the run.
• ·A recent race and time, which is what sets your training paces.
• ·Your mobile number and your time zone, if you turn on training texts.
• ·Your bib number.
• ·A display name and a picture, if you want one. You can use one of our placeholder images instead, or neither.

One thing worth saying plainly: uploaded profile pictures are stored in a public bucket. We do not publish the file links anywhere except inside the platform, but anyone who has a direct link to the image file can open it without signing in. If that bothers you, pick a placeholder.

• ·Your training log: for each session, whether you did it, how far, how long, how hard it felt on a scale of one to ten, and any note you write.
• ·Which nutrition videos you have watched, and when.
• ·When you were last on the site.
• ·Everything you post on the community boards.
• ·Every message between you and a coach.
• ·A record of each email we send you (your address, the subject, which template, whether it went out or failed) and each text (your number, the message, whether it went out), including anything you text back to us.

There are two, both using Anthropic's Claude, and neither of them decides anything.

Reading the written answers. When this is switched on, the model reads your three written answers plus four facts about your running: whether you have run a marathon, how many, which training group you asked for, and whether you confirmed you can commit to the sixteen weeks. It returns a score from one to five and one sentence saying why. It never sees your name, your email address, your phone number, where you live, your age, how you identify, your club, or your social handles. Those fields are not in what is sent, and the model is told not to guess at them. The score is a first-pass sort so that human readers can work through several thousand applications. A person makes every decision about who gets a place.

Drafting coach replies. When you message Meaghan or Meghann, the model writes a draft reply for her to read. That draft is built from your conversation, your first name, your training group, your weight if you gave it, your dietary profile, and your plan and logs for the last two weeks, because a useful answer to "can I move Wednesday?" has to know what Wednesday is. Nothing sends itself. A coach reads the draft, edits it or not, and sends it herself.

Anthropic processes this for us through its API and does not use it to train models.

• ·You gave it to us. You filled in the form and pressed submit, and the form says what it is for.
• ·We need most of it to run the program you applied to: choose a hundred women, set your paces, work out your fueling, get a bib and a package to you, and tell you what is happening.
• ·Some of it is consent, and you can take that consent back whenever you like: texts, how you identify, your profile picture, and anything you post to the boards.
• ·We keep a record of what we sent you and when, because we need to be able to show what happened.

The program is open to residents of the United States (see the Official Rules), and your information is held on servers in the United States.

The program team sees your application and your messages. That is what they are for: Meaghan, Meghann, and the small group running the program read them. Beyond that, the companies below run parts of the platform for us and see only the part they need:

ASICS receives your application information, including your name and email address, as the Official Rules describe. Your mobile number is not part of that: it stays with the program team and the company that carries our texts. If you are selected, the Official Rules also let Believe in the Run, Featherstone Nutrition and ASICS use your name, photo, city, story and application answers in program content.

• ·Supabase: the database, the sign-in system, and file storage. Everything described on this page lives there.
• ·Vercel: hosting. Its server logs record the usual things a web server records, including your IP address and which pages you asked for.
• ·Resend: sends our email. It sees your email address and the message.
• ·Twilio: sends and receives our texts. It sees your number and the message. Texting is not live yet; this applies from the day it is.
• ·Anthropic: the two uses described above.
• ·Vimeo: hosts the nutrition videos. We load the player with its do-not-track setting turned on.
• ·Google: only if you choose to sign in with Google, and then only your basic account details. You can set a password instead and never involve Google at all.

We do not sell your information. We do not give it to advertisers. There are no advertising or analytics trackers on this site.

Once you are training with us you can connect a Strava or COROS account from your account page, so the runs you already record land on your LA100 calendar next to the session your coach planned. This is your choice, it is off until you turn it on, and it is read only: we never post to Strava or COROS, and we never change anything in your account there.

When a connection is on, we pull from that service:

• ·Each activity's start time, distance, elapsed time, sport type and name, and your average heart rate for it, when the service provides one.
• ·The identifier the service uses for you and for each activity, so the same run is never counted twice.
• ·An access token that lets us read those activities. It is stored on our servers, used only for this, and never shown to anyone.

We do not pull your routes, maps, photos, comments, friends, or anything from other people. Imported runs are treated exactly like runs you log by hand: your coaches see them, other runners do not, and anything you type yourself is never overwritten by an import.

Disconnect at any time from your account page, or by revoking LA100 in your Strava or COROS settings. Disconnecting stops the sync immediately and deletes the token. Runs already on your calendar stay, because they are your training record; ask us and we will remove them.

Texting is never automatic. There are two separate asks, and saying yes to one is not saying yes to the other:

• ·On the application form, you can ask us to text you about your application: a message when your decision is ready, and a reminder before an invitation window closes.
• ·In your runner profile, once you are selected, you can turn on training texts: reminders and coach updates, roughly one to three a week.

Either way we record that you said yes and the moment you said it. Message frequency varies. Message and data rates may apply. Reply STOP to any message and the texts stop; reply HELP and you get a message telling you who we are and how to reach us. We hold sends inside quiet hours in your own time zone, and we keep what you text back so a person can read and answer it. A text to a coach's number is kept as a message in your account, alongside the ones you write on the site, marked as sent by text; her reply may come back as a text from that number. A photo sent either way is stored privately with the message and shown only to you and the program team.

Your mobile number and the fact that you said yes to texts are used only to send you the texts described here. They are never shared with third parties or affiliates for marketing or promotional purposes, never sold, and not given to ASICS. Twilio carries the messages and sees only what it needs to deliver them.

Turning off texts does not affect your application or your place. Email still reaches you. The texts page shows exactly where you opt in, what the first text says, and how to stop.

This site sets one kind of cookie: the sign-in session, from Supabase. It is refreshed on each request so that you stay signed in and are not thrown back to the sign-in page mid-session. Without it there is no way to know it is you.

That is the whole list. No analytics cookies, no advertising cookies, no third-party trackers, no pixels. You can read the public pages and fill in the application form without us setting a cookie for you at all.

• ·Applications are kept after the cycle closes. The main reason is that women apply more than once: keeping the record means that if you come back next year we know you came back, and we can see what you told us last time rather than treating you as a stranger.
• ·Runner accounts close after the program ends. Your training history stays with the program record for a period after that, and then goes.
• ·Email and text logs are kept so we can show what we sent and when.
• ·Anything you ask us to delete, we delete, whatever the schedule says.

We have not yet fixed a number of years against each of these. Until we do, take it that we keep records for as long as the program has a use for them, and that a deletion request is honored regardless.

You can ask us to:

• ·tell you what we hold about you,
• ·send you a copy of it,
• ·correct anything that is wrong,
• ·delete it,
• ·stop texting you, or stop emailing you about anything other than your application or your place,
• ·take back a consent you gave, such as how you identify or your profile picture.

Email alex@bigrunmedia.com and say which one you want. We will confirm we got it and answer within thirty days. Asking will never count against your application.

There is no delete button in the platform today. A deletion request is carried out by hand, which means your application, your profile, your training logs, your messages, and your posts are removed. Some records have to survive: if we have already sent you an email or a text, the log line proving we sent it stays.

The application is for adults. The Official Rules require you to be eighteen or older, and the form rejects any age below that. We do not knowingly collect information from children, and if we learn that we have, we delete it.

• ·Passwords are handled by the sign-in system and are never stored by us in a form anyone can read.
• ·The database enforces who can read what at the row level rather than in the page code, so a runner can read her own training, her own messages, and the boards she belongs to, and nothing else.
• ·Invitation links are long random tokens, and only a hash of the token is stored. We could not send you your own link back if we tried.
• ·During blind review, each reader's scores are invisible to the other readers until the round is opened.

No system is perfect. If something goes wrong that affects your information, we will tell you what happened and what we are doing about it.

If we change it, the date at the top changes with it. If a change matters to you, such as a new company seeing your data or a new thing being collected, we will email the people it affects rather than quietly editing the page.

Questions about any of this, or a request under the section above: alex@bigrunmedia.com.

The rules for using the site itself are in the terms of use.