Don't know if this forum or community is still active, but I'm interested in to getting my feet wet into the world of speed running by taking on Marvel's Spiderman. Though I've been a spectator of speed running for some years now, thanks to events like AGDQ and SGDQ, I've never attempted to beat a game as quickly as possible. My main concerns are properly timing my playthroughs. Do I just start a stopwatch on my phone and go or are there ways to automatically start and end a timer with splits while playing on a console? If anyone can provide assistance in my new venture, please feel free to reply.

Just start and stop your timer/stopwatch manually. Check the Rules for when the time is supposed to start and end.

Feel free to also run the DLCs (if you have them, of course). The DLCs are way shorter than the main story and can get you prepared for main story runs.

I did a run of NG+ Ultimate last night and ended up with a time of 5:59:50. It's evident that I should practice playing the DLCs. Thank you for your recommendation, BurkeMaverick.