June 2, 2008 11:22 PM

Social networking for endurance runners

I'm not much into social networking on the Internet - primarily, I confess, because I'm an old happily married man with little need for the offerings of Facebook, MySpace and the like. But I was intrigued when I recently ran across Athlinks, a networking site for endurance athletes.

I plugged my name into its search function and it immediately listed my race results for 33 events dating back to 1995. That's a highly useful feature. Oh, I've got my results recorded all right, but where? Athlinks just saved me hours, perhaps days, of searching through old Day-Timers, scraps of paper and old bibs, some with my races times written on them, some not.

Athlinks claims to have "the largest results database for endurance races on the planet" and boasts that it adds "well over one million individual results each month, so chances are good that we already have the majority of your races covered."

The site promises to "include all running, cycling, triathlon and multisport, swimming, adventure racing, mountain biking and any other timed endurance event that you can find."

With race results already in the system, it's then up to the athlete to add the social networking. "You can attach race reports, ratings, photos, gear usage, and more to individual results so that you can share the info with your friends or simply reflect on the day's race," Athlinks says.

Sharing of information is an element of endurance racing that only gets more important as the difficulty of the race increases. As an example, look at the message board for the Pikes Peak Marathon and read the hundreds of posts discussing pacing, training, strategies for dealing with altitude, gear, the best deals on hotel rooms, even whether it's possible to walk the entire course.

When I began training for the Leadville Trail 100 in 2004, I reached out through my articles in this newspaper for advice from veteran runners and was very pleased with the responses I got. The information not only helped me successfully run the race but it helped others as I passed it on in the newspaper.

As I continued with ultra racing in following years, I subscribed for a time to ULTRA list, operated by Dartmouth College. But the system worked by funneling all the posts and ripostes into my e-mail. I was soon getting 50 e-mails a day, only a few of which were useful, so I dropped the inbox-clogging service.

Athlinks promises to be a site I can pop into and out of at my leisure, much like the increasingly useful message boards of the races I like to run.

But it's got a few bugs. When I first searched my name, I noticed immediately that my 2005 finish in the Bear 100 wasn't listed. I also noticed there were four "Bob Findlays," so I clicked on each to see who they are.

Aha, they're all me, and there's my missing Bear 100 result, attributed to a Bob Findlay from Utah because the race is based in Utah.

The next imposter had my time from last year's Collegiate Peaks Trail Run in Buena Vista; Athlinks had decided Buena Vista was in Texas and had made me a Texan (the horror!). And the Alaskan Bob Findlay was actually me running a marathon in Alaska.

Athlinks comes with a handy feature for claiming those race results as my own, which I did. When I checked a day later, I was properly credited with 36 race results instead of the original 33. But the other three Bob Findlays were still there, and now each has all 36 of my race results instead of just one result.

Hmmm: definitely some need for tweaking there, and who's to know how many such imposters are among the 38,000 people Athlinks is claiming as members.

Posted by Bob Findlay at 11:22 PM | Comments (2)