Fell Running results data

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Blair Garrett (CVFR) has put together a neat little web app in which you can search peoples' fell race results. BAsed on the FRA results pages (I guess) this is similar to the sortable results the SHR and Hayfield fell races website use - and something I've thought would have been nice for the FRA results site for a while.

https://blairg.github.io/fellrace-finder/

It also includes a few interesting statistics (category position, % time of winner, club position).

There will be bugs (shortening/different spellings of names, changes of club etc. I imagine) but it looks an interesting and fun device

That's an interesting tool. It coped with my club change perfectly. A top 80% finish looks impressive until you realise it really means bottom 20%. You wouldn't have that problem, ba-ba.

I think it is mainly sorted by name, not club.
An errant 'Nicholas Barber' has crept into my results (lowering my average the bugger!), but not the usual suspect (Nick Barber from Todmorden)

It's a decent service. Not wanting to put a negative on it at all (after all, it's free!), but a lot of races missing. Though i suppose it's only as good as the data it can find off the internet.

It’s great. I couldn’t find myself. I wouldn’t want folk knowing how crap I am

Does it pick up the results on the FRA website that are on PDF files for example, ie, are links on the results page rather than viewable directly? Either way, well done Blair.

I don't know but I imagine for the ease of a scraping algorithm/script (I think I just made that phrase up) it would just be results in the FRA results format, otherwise there'd be a lot of manual donkeywork.

A nice little tool. As others above have suggested looks like it is just parsing data out of the results that are directly on the FRA results page. I imagine parsing the data from the .pdf results would be a much bigger task given the lack of consistency and number of different templates that are used.

I've seen a similar tool for run britain rankings for those that dare run on the roads.

The fell running community and number of people likely to use this is probably small enough, but I think scraping data like this is generally discouraged due to the load it can place on the bandwidth of the website.

Every time I find myself on the Scottish Hill Runners site I always think how good the sorting/searching functions are and how complete the database is!

yes the SHR site is good.
Powerof10 (and to a lesser extent runbritain) are very good for road/track/XC. There was a time fell race results were put on powerof10 though this appears to have stopped in 2014.

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Originally Posted by ba-ba

yes the SHR site is good.
Powerof10 (and to a lesser extent runbritain) are very good for road/track/XC. There was a time fell race results were put on powerof10 though this appears to have stopped in 2014.

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This is a shame... my run britain handicap declines through the summer months when I don't do any races which they count. Then when the winter xc and relays comes around it improves again...

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Originally Posted by Travs

This is a shame... my run britain handicap declines through the summer months when I don't do any races which they count. Then when the winter xc and relays comes around it improves again...

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If I recall correctly, Power of 10 were unable to process the results for fell races due to the admin load it incurred (I emailed at the time & had a reply that I think said something along those lines). Fell race results never counted towards P10 or Run Britain handicap, even when they were uploaded. On another note, does anyone ever win an HRM for improving their handicap on Run Britain, or is the competition a data-harvesting rouse?

Hello, it’s me the creator of the app.
I did a lot of work a few weeks ago to normalise all the spellings of club and runner names so it’s worth checking it again.
I’ve just recently added performance graphs and table showing the number of races per month and year. A couple of accordions below the search bar.
Next on my radar are the ability to select multiple runner names, so if you come up as unattached, unknown it will pull these in.
Then going to look into pulling in BOFRA and Scottish Hill Runners data in.
Anything anyone thinks it’s really lacking in its current form? The PDF results would be nice. Could potentially be quite complicated. Although I’ve not even tried to pull these in yet.

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Originally Posted by Blairg

Hello, it’s me the creator of the app.

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I'm just so impressed you've created this - thank you. :)

I'll have a play with the new functions and let you know.

I think the only extra I can think of is, when you hover over a point on your results graph, as well as giving you the percent of winner and date, you also get the race name show up?

My personal excel/google sheet race results spreadsheet is feeling quite lofi at the moment.

I’ll look at adding the race name too.

Accordions? I can't find the new functions.

When a runner changes clubs I assume the race entries have to remain separate, per club?

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Originally Posted by Blairg

The PDF results would be nice. Could potentially be quite complicated. Although I’ve not even tried to pull these in yet.

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I have used this "https://www.ghostscript.com/" in the past to convert PDFs. But if the structure is not consistant than that is a major issue.

You may need to refresh a couple of times to see the new functionality. Are you using a PC/Laptop or smart phone?

Yes, they are separate per club. I’m working on a new feature where you can select multiple people and munge them together. So if you have run for different clubs you will be able to get a single view rather than separate. Rather than me or anyone else manually doing this, self service feels best for this.

Cool, I’ll check out Ghostscript. Having PDF results would be icing on the cake.

You sort of need to think of PDFs as consisting of two layers. One layer is just a photo of the document it has been created from, that is the bit you can see. The second layer would be plain text representation of that documnet. A PDF has has been "printed" from, for instance, MS Word or Excel, would have both layers. While a scanned PDF would only have the "photo" layer.

The former is what allows the likes of Google to include PDFs in search results. In the latter case you are into the area of OCR (Optical character recognition) which is problamatic. Any results PDFs are much more likely to have been produced using the former method and you have much better chances of success there.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Blairg

You may need to refresh a couple of times to see the new functionality. Are you using a PC/Laptop or smart phone?

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Thanks Blairg, found it. I use laptop or PC; never had a smart phone. I like the sound of self-service combining of results too. It's an excellent resource.

Thanks for the info on PDF. It feels like a nice problem to solve. I’ll have a crack and see how I get on. Be a good learning exercise if anything.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Blairg

Yes, they are separate per club. I’m working on a new feature where you can select multiple people and munge them together. So if you have run for different clubs you will be able to get a single view rather than separate. Rather than me or anyone else manually doing this, self service feels best for this.

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But if the entries are separate by accident could you merge them? I (Pauline Linton) appear three times - FRA, Unattached, Unknown. Obviously my fault for filling in the "Club" line differently over the years but if all the entries could be merged (maybe as Unattached (or FRA but that's not technically a club) into one, that would be very nice. :)

I think that the new FRA Races/Results pages on the website are great.

Bravo to whoever designed them :)

I agree. It's nice that you can use multiple filters at the same time in searching for races.

I've just discovered this today. It's very good and intuitive to navigate.