Hi David. I must confess I didn't even know this bulletin board existed and was pleased to see everything is nicely organized and the RRTC is alive and well.
There have been several posts about the USATF results and rankings site and I wanted to clarify what Running USA (and the Road Running Information Center) is doing in that regard. The former site you refer to was linked from USATF but it was actually maintained by our staff. As Pete mentioned in another post, it is important to be proactive and solicit results rather than waiting for them to appear in the emailbox. We are still doing that. The USATF results are forwarded to us but most of our results are downloaded from web sites that we have permission to copy from. We have doubled the number of performances we are getting electronicially in just a few years - about 4 million a year.
Formerly, we partnered with Dennis and Leon from Race Central. Leon did an excellent job of writing the software needed to display results and compile rankings based on our algorithms but we couldn't afford to pay him what he was worth. (It always comes down to money doesn't it?) We also wanted to take the rankings to another level. The Active Network stepped in and provided both programming expertise, access to many more results than before and assistance in getting a good sponsor for the service. We now have a site that has both annual rankings (time lists for each distance for every state, city, age group, gender) as well as point rankings similar to what we had before, but expanded to all age groups. We use the new WMA (formerly WAVA) tables developed with Alan Jones and endorsed by everyone as part of the new algorithm for achieving points.
If you haven't seen the latest rankings site, go to
http://www.active.com/rankings or go to
http://www.runningusa.org and click on 'Road Rankings'. The latter site also has single age records which we will update at least once a year when Andy Carr is ready. The official USATF age group records will of course remain on the usatf.org site.
Currently the new rankings site is in final stage of beta version. There is a complete redesign in the works which will make it even easier to use and provide more information. In the next few months I will be 'claiming' results for the top runners to ensure that the rankings are meaningful. Active is also planning on creating a searchable results site that should be functioning by the end of the year.
Cheers, Linda Honikman
Running USA Information Services (and RRIC)
