Cool Running is GONE

Yeah, Active is the worst. I haven't signed up for a race in years using them but I remember them deliberty trying to trick you into adding on a subscription after completing your event registration.

Ho Hum wrote:

Man, this sucks. If Active gave a sh*t about anything besides squeezing money out of our sport, they would've ported the old results over.

Had Some Myself wrote:

Hmmm, I used that pace calculator all the time when figuring out things for the kids I coach. It was flexible and switched back and forth between unknowns and units easily.

Does anyone have any good substitute suggestions?

The Active one looks similar but only allows pace in minutes per mile or minutes per kilometer. Not a terribly difficult conversion to make, but having time per 400m was pretty convenient.

https://runfastcoach.com/calc2/

Dang, Cool Running's pace calculator was the best. None of the alternatives that people are posting here are as good. None of them replicate all of the features that CR's had, and none of them have an interface that is as easy to use.

Wow, this is absolutely devastating. The years of results Coolrunning had accumulated are absolutely priceless, and the fact that they're now gone forever is such a huge blow to the running community. One of my favorite things to do before racing here in Massachusetts (where about 70% of races got uploaded to Coolrunning) was open a bunch of tabs of the race's past results and compare each year. Some results went so far back I could look up to see how my father finished in the same races I was lining up to compete in for the first time.

I agree that the whole "outdated interface" excuse is BS. A comic book company recently bought a video game forum called NintendoAge (a community of retro video game guys) and completely wiped the site, using the same argument. My guess is that Active saw Coolrunning's results as direct competition to their own brand and decided the best business decision was to completely wipe it.

I'm generally a very pro-business guy who sympathizes with companies in cases like this, but this is just such a slap in the face to the sport. If Active cared at all about road running, they would have archived these results in some way.

I will not be using Active for any race signups moving forward.

Can letsrun.com just add a good pace calculator to the site?

The Coolrunning pace calculator page is backed up on the web archive, and the javascript that performs the calculations is hardcoded into the page (rather than loaded from a separate file on a server that will no longer exist). That means you can always access the real, original thing right here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20191209031517/http://www.coolrunning.com/engine/4/4_1/96.shtml

I just picked a random date's snapshot, but you can use their 'wayback' archive to look up any one that you want. On the off chance that that is not desirable or for some reason it gets removed (unlikely), I have the javascript myself and can put it on a webpage of its own, but all that'd be doing is giving a different url to something that already exists.

I made a thread earlier about this but this one seems to be doing better then mine, what about all of the results that were lost on the website? Is there nothing we can do to save them? Imagine how some people must feel that lost some of their best results ever that were on the site. Imagine running your marathon pr or 5k Pr and just having no record of it anywhere!

There are some sporadic, old results available through the same mechanism; however, they don't appear to be very comprehensive. That said, I have read here and there that what can be viewed by the public-facing 'wayback machine' is just a subset of what is actually archived by the Internet Archive organization. I would imagine that right now what you or I would see clicking around the links on the archived pages would just be random races that people chose to take a 'snapshot' of at some point in time; however, I believe the organization itself automatically crawls pretty much the entire internet taking periodic snapshots of pretty much everything. It might be worth someone contacting the organization directly and asking whether they themselves have all the data for historical races backed up. Each event had a public-facing webpage, so in theory it could have been automatically archived, but is simply not displayed. I doubt they would make everything public just like that, but at least then we'd know the information was *somewhere* and we (or maybe the Bros) could assess how to properly get access to it.

Until then, I'll keep poking around the wreckage of coolrunning to see if there's a leftover api link or something, but I doubt it. The above is probably the most likely route to getting that info.

Dang. And I’m still grieving mensracing.com

Corporations like Active with predatory, dishonest strategies ruin the sport. In this case, they have taken with them an enormous trove of race results, many of which are probably not archived elsewhere. That's a major loss for the sport.

Go to this page for Massachusetts 2018. There are links to 959 URLs. Click on one of them. Then click on the link for the date next to "Saved 1 time".

https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.coolrunning.com/results/18/ma//*

Hope this helps.

I noticed the site was gone at a track meet yesterday when I was trying to figure out lap times for my runners. That pace calculator sure will be missed. Use it for almost every race. Hopefully those links people posted on here keep working for a while.

If you're looking for replacement pace calc, here's one I created a couple years ago:

https://simplepacecalc.com/

Let me know if you have any suggestions to improve it.

Count me as another who will boycott active.com. Erasing 20 years of road race history tells me their business model doesn't understand who their core customers are and will be in the future. They aren't stewards of the sport, they are investors looking for short term dollars.

It’s painful isn’t it, I loved looking back on my old results from when I was a kid. It was really nice seeing how far I came since I starting running in 2003, and know all those results are gone. I wish they would’ve at least warned everyone that this was going to happens instead of just deleting everything without notice!

I've said this elsewhere and I will say it here. I think a good volume of measured and reasonable emails/messages to Active might induce them to make the results available again, at least temporarily.

But angrily demanding anything or calling them a terrible company will not. It won't get us anywhere. Active is in the driver's seat here. They don't *need* to do anything. If they decide they just want to permanently kill those results, they will. But whatever view you have of Active as a company they're still just a bunch of people. It might be possible to convince them.

Just posting the email I received from CoolRunning on the 9th of December, warning registered users of this !

-----

Dear psmith241,

After a couple of decades of being the leading running website / community in Australia, it's time to finish. The business of such a site, with its high overheads and dwindling membership (to Facebook and elsewhere), is no longer viable.

I'm sorry to see it go, as is Kevin Tiller, its founder and mainstay for so many years. But there it is.

If you haven't been to CoolRunning for a while, how about logging on one last time to reminisce, see who's still around, and and say "hit". It would be good to see you. You can login at

http://www.coolrunning.com.au/forums/index.php?app=core&module=global&section=login

Cheers,

Craig (Bellthorpe)

You can easily calculate splits here: runcalc.net/#split

This is terrible. Not only the always handy pace calculator but the race results archive were invaluable particularly for New England races. I used it all the time, I think Active has owned it for about 7-10 years and did nothing with it beyond wrecking the race calendar turning it into a vehicle to flog random color type races

Looks like someone ported the same calculator as a standalone.

https://calc.run/

The only time I have used cool running was for that stupid calculator.