watchmyultra
Audience engagement for long swims

Follow the swim, not just the dot.

Bring spectators closer to the swim with live progress, performance metrics, lake conditions, environmental map layers and post-swim replay. All built specifically for marathon swimming.

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The tracker replaying a finished crossing: track, currents, waves and the lake floor beneath.
Swims

Featured swims

Upcoming, live, and completed crossings

Tracked with us

The crew set the swim up with watchmyultra, so this page was the swim's own tracker and the people below followed it here.

Replay

The full crossing

Lev Goldberg

Port Sanilac, MI to Ipperwash Beach, ON
Total time
29h 43m
Distance
53.2 km
Date
Aug 5, 2026
Followed by
1,275
Peak at once
51
Donate taps
54

Followed from a public tracker

Built around a tracker link the swim had already made public. We were not part of these crews, and nothing here came from them.

Lake Ontario3 crossings

Replay

The full crossing

Michael Pollanen

Niagara-on-the-Lake → Vicki Keith Point
Total time
17h 47m
Distance
44.6 km
Date
Aug 11, 2026
Replay

The full crossing

Bryan Huffman

Marilyn Bell Park, Toronto to Port Dalhousie, ON
Total time
19h 04m
Distance
49.2 km
Date
Jul 30, 2026
Replay

The full crossing

Attila Mányoki

Niagara-on-the-Lake → Marilyn Bell Park
Total time
16h 33m
Distance
51.4 km
Date
Jul 19, 2026

Nothing here is official. Every time, distance and speed on this site is worked out from the swimmer's GPS tracker — a device on a boat reporting every few minutes — and the conditions come from public forecast models, not from instruments in the water. The crew's log is the swim's own record, and a sanctioning body such as Solo Swims of Ontario is what makes a crossing official. Where a crew has given us a start or finish time we use theirs and say so; everything else is our best reading of the dots.

After the swim

See how people followed

After a swim, watchmyultra provides a simple audience report showing how people followed the crossing and responded to any fundraiser linked from the tracker.

  • Audience and repeat interest Estimated viewers, returning visitors, and peak concurrent viewers give a clearer picture of the audience around the swim — useful context when talking with existing or potential sponsors.
  • Fundraiser response Fundraiser-link clicks show how many viewers chose to learn more or take the next step, giving swimmers and charity partners something concrete to review after the event.
  • Attention over time Hourly activity shows when people joined, returned, or followed in greater numbers, helping explain how attention developed across a long swim.
Sample post-swim audience report showing estimated viewers, return visits, concurrent viewers, and fundraiser link clicks SAMPLE DATA · OPEN THE FULL REPORT
Development history

How the project got here

Shipped in the open, newest first

Date Feature Why it matters
Audience reports Post-swim reports now show estimated viewers, repeat interest, peak concurrency, and fundraiser clicks—giving swimmers, charities, and sponsors a concrete picture of a crossing's reach.
Resilient tracking and backups Live checkpoints, explicit tracker-health states, safer start and finish judgements, one-command archiving, and offsite backups protect the record when a device, request, or server fails.
Great Lakes depth NOAA bathymetry became a map layer and a depth reading beneath the swimmer, adding geographic context to routes across the Great Lakes.
Wind, waves, and water ECCC wave and wind guidance joined water temperature and current overlays, helping spectators see the conditions shaping progress rather than watching an unexplained dot.
Lev Goldberg · Lake Huron Lev became the first swimmer to use watchmyultra as the official tracker for his crossing. More than a demo, it was the first test of the project as a service for someone else's swim—with a real audience, fundraiser, crew, and 30-hour crossing to support.
Honest live status Progress changed to distance covered, tracker silence stopped implying a finish, and early tracking gates made the public status match what could actually be supported by the data.
Public project website A dedicated landing page, local swimmer photography, and improved social previews gave each crossing a credible public home beyond the live map itself.
Pre-start and finished states Countdowns, planned-route layers, preserved real endpoints, and guarded result cards made the experience useful before a start and accurate after the landing.
Map-first redesign A full-bleed responsive map, glass information panels, replay playhead, track clusters, viewport-aware framing, and a mobile pass turned the tracker into a spectator experience across screen sizes.
Replay and multi-tracker support Headless MP4 exports made completed swims shareable, while dual SPOT-device merging and cadence-aware fixes improved continuity during real crossings.
First working tracker The initial live-swim page, configurable event details, and a fully populated demo established the small, independent foundation the rest of the project builds on.
Attila Mányoki · Lake Ontario This is where watchmyultra started. I wanted to follow my friend's Lake Ontario crossing and better understand what was actually happening during a 16-hour swim—not just watch a dot move across a map. I started building the tracker from that experience.
Contact

Have a swim in mind?

I would be glad to hear what you are planning, or what would make the tracker more useful.