"I see that you can add ‘activities’ to your daily walking steps but how do you handle runners, especially those training for marathons or that run long distances regularly? Wouldn’t they almost just automatically win the competitions?

Excellent question. Your primary objective should definitely be to reward participation, diligence and improvement. There are a couple of ways of going about this:

Weigh competitions on participation
We always highly recommend that if there are prizes of some kind, several metrics are awarded. We just recently had a large team competition complete -- the teams were large, between 50 and 200 people. In that competition to determine the winners they used the number of people active at the end of the competition as compared to the starting number, in other words the attrition rate.

For example: If they had 50 people to start and only 34 finished, they used that percentage of remainders as a multiplier by their average, so that the teams with the largest drop-offs had lower scores. This is a great way to encourage a team leader and members to take an active role in keeping the team together.

Another great way to do this is: Run a challenge on one of our map-based competitions. In those competitions, anyone who makes it to the end of the map in the time allotted, we consider a 'winner'. As an incentive, say that everyone who completes the course will be given a prize, and 5 will be chosen at random for a 'Grand Prize'. 

Use Walker Tracker's Points and Levels system

We created the point system in order to measure progress and participation in the site, while staying away from rewarding people for walking the most steps. You receive points for everything but your step totals: Competition participation, diligence, meeting your goals, encouraging others, etc. In your administration section under 'Statistics', you can get a view of how people are doing, both in terms of the levels they've achieved and the points they've earned. Running a program on total points earned is a great way to measure general progress, without exclusively awarding your triathletes.

Competition Limits
Another way to do competitions is to use a 'limit' - this allows you to only allow people within certain average ranges to join a competition. That way you can run one competition for your top walkers, and another one for your lower-lever walkers. (see picture).

Goal Challenges

We consider diligence the most important metric on the site. If you stay with your program, you will begin to improve. That's why Goal Challenges  (all map-based competitions are Goal competitions, as well as the ones specifically listed as 'Goal Challenges' on the Create a competition page) are great ways to reward everyone who completes a course. In Goal Challenges, everyone who meets the competitions criteria in the requisite amount of time wins.