Tuesday, April 20, 2004
Running for something
I had a friend run the Boston Marathon today. This is, I think, the second consecutive year she's run it. I'm sure she finished, but I don't know for sure. They have a very high-tech way of timing and monitoring everyone and their progress--electronic chips that are coded with each individual runner's bib number, all this other stuff--yet their website's search engine just plain sucks.
I was able only to search by category of runner--so the most narrow I could get my search was down to a pool of 3000 female runners in my friend's significant age range, the "open" category, which accepts the youngest contestants to those who are 39. Furthermore, I could only search the top 1000 runners in this category, which meant that a full two-thirds of the finishers in this category went untouched by my search. And when I say "search," I'm using loose terminology; there was no "search," really, as the only criterion I could enter was for age range. I could not search by name, state, hair color, body proportion, shoe brand, or any of the other categories the broader internet has accustomed me to. I could not even search by time it took individual racers to complete the race, nor could I see more than the top 1000 finishers.
I didn't think I was asking a whole lot. I decided to use my web browser's "Find" capability to search the "search" results for her name. I was bound to save myself some time, at least somehow. The slap in the face: I could only view 25 records at a time, and I could not jump ahead more than one page at a time. It took several pages for me to find out my friend must not have been one of the top 1000 female finishers in her division.
To finish the marathon is a gigantic feat, especially the heat like they had today over there in Boston. It's an epic race, with epic athletes and an epic story and an epic history. Can't searching the results, at least, not be so incredibly difficult?
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