My Dad ran in college back in the '70s. I knew he was pretty good because when I was a little kid we visited his college, and he had a lot of plaques on the walls and trophies behind glass in the athletic facilities. One day I started Googling his name and a few key phrases and found newspaper stories available online. Turns out he was all-American. Later on, I found the results of that actual race, filed as a poorly scanned typewritten document. You can find some stuff.
I stopped racing competitively in the early 2000s. It's incredible how so much prior to 2005ish is just gone. Memory holed.
Yep. And this will happen to everything that is digital at some point. That is why I would never go without analog copies of things that matter to me: really good books, photos of my kids, journals, DVDs of the family trips, love letters, training logs.
When my grandfather passed away, I made a box for the things that he cherished most and everyone from the family put things in there that were associated with him. It is like a real treasure chest; The whole family likes to look at what the others have put in there: maps, knives, medals, photos, expired passports, his favorite books, silver coins, his varsity letter from 1946, stuff from Korea... There is nothing digital in the box.
Nothing remains of my HS running career in the 90s, except for my state XC appearances on athletic.net/etc. No districts and no regionals in XC or track, not even the time I went to state in track because I wasn't top 8 and nobody bothered to keep the full track race results. You'd think they'd have keep full race results of at least the districts/regionals/state all the back since forever.
the internet wasn't around then so you won't find anything. nobody is going to post times from 30 years prior unless they were exceptional i.e national records or close to.
I do sort of wish someone could go back and digitalize all the state meets...
Athlinks randomly added my results from the state meet 10 years ago. Maybe you are able to upload old race results there?
This thread reminds me of the race car driver in "On the Beach", the great book by Nevil Shute. He wins the last Grand Prix and puts a plaque on the dash of his car proclaiming the victory for all to see. But since everyone is dying from nuclear fallout, no one will be around to see or care. It's a poignant moment, for sure.
Yours is a deeper philosophical question than just "I forgot my times." It's a look into your future. We are not immortal any more than our race times are. Nothing we do in life will last much beyond our passing. Build those monuments and write those tomes, but it'll all be dust pretty soon. So, go out and enjoy the day. Love your friends and family. Run some miles if you like. It's all "dust in the wind."
my online results go back to 1979, thanks entirely to the Two Oceans marathon website.. Athlinks suddenly realized that a few years ago, so those times are also on Athlinks.
But I have to agree with other posters, everything online will disintegrate exactly as paper records do. I have weblog posts from ten years ago where every single link is dead..
training logs go back to 1975 when I started so I do have a complete record. There are a few newspaper cuttings and race result paper copies in there as well.
I started using spreadsheets to keep track of race results in 2001 after beginning triathlon, as the results were available in easily scraped HTML. So I have an xls file per year since then, a page for each race. These are backed up locally and remotely. Once I'm gone they will too ;-)
Now at 62 I find I have to reset every year, used to track PRs by the triathlon 5-year age groups, now have to track every year - this year's 5k PR is only 1min slower than last year's, instead of the usual trend of 2min slower every year, call that the victory..
This thread reminds me of the race car driver in "On the Beach", the great book by Nevil Shute. He wins the last Grand Prix and puts a plaque on the dash of his car proclaiming the victory for all to see. But since everyone is dying from nuclear fallout, no one will be around to see or care. It's a poignant moment, for sure.
Yours is a deeper philosophical question than just "I forgot my times." It's a look into your future. We are not immortal any more than our race times are. Nothing we do in life will last much beyond our passing. Build those monuments and write those tomes, but it'll all be dust pretty soon. So, go out and enjoy the day. Love your friends and family. Run some miles if you like. It's all "dust in the wind."
It's kind of like the old "if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" question.
I wonder whether there'll be any trace of any of our existence in the year 2200. The elites browsing this site may still have their names recorded if they won an Olympic medal, and those who're incredibly successful in other fields (i.e., founding a major multinational company or discovering a cure for cancer) may get a brief mention in an encyclopedia. But for the vast majority of us, I think that our only surviving trace would be census records and maybe tombstones if the land hasn't been converted into something else.
Do stuff because it's fun, not because you want to leave a legacy.
The New York City Marathon has archives back to the beginning. I have no problem finding my time from 1975. Likewise Boston is starting to archive results. When I started road-racing, I wrote down my time and place, the winner’s name and time for each race for 50 years. As I look through the list of race winners, I would have to agree with you. None of them would remember me. But I won some and it is satisfying. But no runner I knew ran to be remembered. They just enjoyed it.
This thread reminds me of the race car driver in "On the Beach", the great book by Nevil Shute. He wins the last Grand Prix and puts a plaque on the dash of his car proclaiming the victory for all to see. But since everyone is dying from nuclear fallout, no one will be around to see or care. It's a poignant moment, for sure.
Yours is a deeper philosophical question than just "I forgot my times." It's a look into your future. We are not immortal any more than our race times are. Nothing we do in life will last much beyond our passing. Build those monuments and write those tomes, but it'll all be dust pretty soon. So, go out and enjoy the day. Love your friends and family. Run some miles if you like. It's all "dust in the wind."
Exactly. Even my high school where I have records to this day thinks the world began in 2010, and if you ran before Wetmore at CU you don't exist.
Exactly. I coach distance, and my sprints coach won a state title in High School running a 10.4x (I don’t recall the time). His high school SCHOOL RECORD is listed as 10.82. Yes he ran 10.4x and ran under 10.6 3 times.
You can get a login on newspapers.com and search your name for old results. I’ve found ones over 100 years old from high school meets. Also, track down some high school yearbooks from a classmate. Try looking up microform collections in your local library (or the library nearer to where your athletic exploits took place).
even stuff on the internet isn’t forever. I know I can’t locate results from when I went to college just 20 years ago, and I’m pretty sure all of those were on the net at some point. Yes, even tried the way back machine.
You could probably find them on the dark web, but it wouldn't be worth the effort.
Normally I'm all about nostalgia posts but I don't think I've ever cared to film myself running. Maybe I'll feel this way when I'm too old to run or do the things I used to do.
Exactly. Even my high school where I have records to this day thinks the world began in 2010, and if you ran before Wetmore at CU you don't exist.
Exactly. I coach distance, and my sprints coach won a state title in High School running a 10.4x (I don’t recall the time). His high school SCHOOL RECORD is listed as 10.82. Yes he ran 10.4x and ran under 10.6 3 times.
That's kind of like my high school in a way. When we switched over from the 440 to the 400, the 880 to the 800, and the mile to the 1600, the old records were erased even if they were clearly superior.
An interesting theme on this thread is that we don’t even know if the current results online will be there forever. Cool running getting bought by active and then having 20 years of race results lost was shocking. Who knows what would happen to the results on TFRRS, athletic, and milesplit if they were ever bought.
One thing this thread has shown me is I need to start having a back up training log again. In my last year on Collegiate running, I began to log all my training on Strava instead of excel. That was almost 4 years ago now, and if strava ever went down I would lose 4 years of training logs.
Any other oldies in the same boat? It feels weird that a 5:30 JV miler can find his results on milesplit and can watch a YouTube video of him running, but there's nothing comparable for guys like me who've run almost a minute faster in a previous generation.
There's no guarantee that either Milesplit or Youtube will be around in 30-40 years.
I don’t know about Milesplit, but where is YouTube going to go? There is unlimited storage space.
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