After all those years, it's as if I had never run competitively at all

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.

Someone somewhere has pieces of paper with some of your recorded times and placings.

There are people who keep these records.

But so what? Even digitally recorded stats that are available online now are become more obscure by the hour due to the vast flow of traffic. So even a fast runner today will have the same problem as you in years to come.

The solution is to keep building that trophy cabinet of memories in your head.

Get back in shape and set some new PRs

My coach is a 55 years old masters athlete, with 4:00/1500m and 2:23/marathon and yet he doesn't have a profile on World Athletics. Your PRs are even softer and, as others said, Internet took off in the 2000s.

Why is it important? There are few digital records of my exploits as a younger man, but I sincerely hope that my efforts as a husband, father, friend, colleague, and coach are far more impactful and memorable than some race performance from three decades ago. Competitive running was a fun and meaningful part of my life. What I am doing now makes all of that quite trivial.

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.

I do sort of wish someone could go back and digitalize all the state meets...

Those of us who grew up when the Internet was in its early phases may have some interesting stories regarding the patchy stats/records at that time.

I'm a 400/800 guy and ran the 1600 in an early season all-comers for the hell of it. I got a 5:50.

I ran my main events in the remaining meets that season, which were a mix of all-comers, dual meets, and invites. According to my running logs, my slowest 400/800 times that year were 59" / 2:18, and my fastest were 56" / 2:12.

I didn't run competitively after that and graduated the following year. But for some reason, that crappy 1600m I ran got archived, while none of my other meets did. So if you Google my name and "track", "running", "400m", or anything similar, you'll find that I was a 5:50 guy and not a 56" / 2:12 guy. Still bugs me a bit to this day.

I was researching history of my 100-yr-old house and used my library membership to get free access to newspaper archives in my region.

One day I searched my name and got 20-30 results from my HS running days (mostly small type meet summary results you used to find in the sports section). I even found a few pictures! It was a nice trip down memory lane.

This inspired me to check if my college had digitized the student newspaper. They had, another trip down memory lane! What’s interesting is dates and other details didn’t always line up with my memory. There were some nice running efforts at meets I don’t even remember.

I find that this varies wildly per location and even per year. My neighboring city published all of the results you could think of, even for elementary school races put on by the city's recreation department. But my city had nothing unless you won a major invitational, and even then, your time probably wouldn't be posted unless you broke the meet record or something.

Similarly, my 2002 HS yearbook was full of stats and listed not only the times of the fastest frosh-soph and varsity runners in each event but also the number of miles the XC team ran over the summer. The 2003 yearbook, however, omitted any mention of times. It just had pictures and captions saying something to the effect of "John Doe, team captain", "Jane Doe, on her way to winning the 100m", and so on.

There's no guarantee that either Milesplit or Youtube will be around in 30-40 years.

I cannot imagine how frustrating that must be. People on here saying that it doesn’t matter are ridiculous, you worked hard for those times and it stinks that there’s no record of them. I was super fortunate to run in the internet age. I started running in middle school and graduated college in 2019. I would say that 95 percent of my results are online. 100 percent of my meaningful results are online. Everyone of my PR races are on either on my milesplit profile, TFRRS, or IAAF. Some of my PRs were even filmed thanks to milesplit and flotrack coverage. The few results I’m missing are some really small high school duel meets, some middle school races, and a couple road races that I did where they were uploaded on cool running (rip)

I wish someone would make a website where they could upload really old results online, and as long as you can prove timing they would go up somewhere. I think it would be nice for the older runners to have their PRs online. I do think milesplit collects historical results if you can prove them, so it’s worth a shot if you have any old news paper clippings or result print outs.

I have learned that nobody really cares unless you were a world class runner and then nobody cares outside of this website.

Whatever accomplishments you had as an athlete are seared deep within your being and this should give you confidence that when challenges surface you know damn well that you have a certain reservoir of strength that you may draw on which most do not. This is more valuable than any record anywhere else, the one that has been burned into your soul, for lack of a better word.

Regardless of whether other people care, you will care about your times, and failing to find your results is frustrating if you forgot your exact PRs.

I've kept a pretty detailed running log, and even then, I'm missing some details like what the wind reading was during my 200m, whether my indoor 800s were on banked tracks or flat tracks, whether my 400s were electronically or manually timed, and how far off I was from winning the race (or if I won, what my margin of victory was). And I do care about other people's times. Not necessarily because of their names, but because I'm interested in finding out whether I would have DFL'd in a fast heat or lapped someone in a slow heat.

If you didn't write it down, it probably didn't happen.
Don't you have a running log?

That's kind of hard to do in your 60s.

It's important because I take pride in my work. I had a fairly successful career as an architect and helped design quite a few buildings. A few months ago, one of those buildings was demolished to make room for a new development, and even though I got paid for my design work a long time ago, it still felt sad to see that building come down.

Thanks for the tips. I'll see what I can dig up, but I have a feeling that the race results that I'll be able to find won't be the ones I PR'd in. Oh well, beggars can't be choosers.