Foretoken — parkrun finish tokens on your phone

Last year I was at a parkrun event that had 700 finish tokens and (it turned out) 694 finishers. Volunteers were frantically sorting finish tokens as I crossed the line, not knowing whether they’d have enough to get them through to the Tail Walker. Happily, I had a set of tokens in the boot of the car and lent them a batch (I may get them back someday).

Then later in the year 6,204 finishers crossed the line at Bushy parkrun 31/8/2024 | #1000 and they not only ran out of tokens, but contingency raffle tickets as well, and had to write finish positions on hands and record results on pieces of paper.

Since then, I have been thinking that it would be cool to have finish tokens on a phone, like most parkrunners have their personal barcodes on their phones through the popular 5k app.

Being on a career break gives me more time to play with ideas like this, and now I am happy to say that this week I released Foretoken.

Writing a finisher’s position number on the back of their hand with a pen is fairly trivial. Pens are easy to come by.

At a popular event that has run out of finish tokens, it should also be easy to recruit a Finish Token Support volunteer with a smartphone who can accompany a Barcode Scanner and display the correct generated finish tokens for scanning with their barcode by the Virtual Volunteer app.

Want the next sequential one? Swipe left! Or enter the number directly by tapping the token number. It has a couple of bonus features, which I’ll leave you to discover.

So now you can add this app to your phone’s home screen and be ready to help should you ever find an event team scrambling for emergency finish tokens. Let me know how you go!