What's your position?

Last weekend was the 12th Edinburgh Marathon Festival.  On the Saturday my nephew ran the 10km, finishing 4th and on the Sunday two of my training partners ran the marathon finishing in 2.51 and 3.06 respectively.

I know these times and positions because I have spoken to them since their races.  Unfortunately this is the only way I have been able to find out how they got on.  As usual following their races I had scoured the internet to try and find their results and compare them to others in the race ie How they compared to other runners I recognised in the results, How their times compared to the winners time and such like.

 But to no avail. The reason, the organisers decided that they would only publish the results for the first 3 male and female runners in each race.  Individual results for the rest of the fields only being able to be accessed by the runner themselves.  The reason being given seems to be one of data protection!

I understand the need to protect certain information but keeping peoples results private, ie their position in a race and the time it took them to complete the race, is to me nonsense.  To me and I know many others (who spend considerably more time than myself analysing race results) the results are an intrinsic part of the race package.  We like to compare ourselves to friends, clubmates and rivals from other clubs.  As well as other runners in our own particular age category.

The results provide an indicator of progress against others and can become a strong motivating factor.  By not issuing results the organisers are saying that participants are only interested in completing the course and not the competition a race provides.

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