The Association of Road Racing Statisticians was basically a one-man show operated from the remote Northern California shores by Ken Young. When the site existed its intro read:
The Association of Road Racing Statisticians (ARRS) is an independent, non-profit organization that collects, analyses and publishes results and statistics regarding elite distance running at distances 3000m and longer...The data of ARRS is stored in the ARRS database, which has more than 1.3 million performances from more than 240,000 races by more than 95,000 elite and sub-elite distance runners worldwide...This website and the ARRS database has been created entirely through volunteer efforts. Many hundreds of people have contributed race results and other useful information over a period of many years. Some of these people have spent a great deal of time vetting the information, correcting errors, adding missing information, and providing ancillary information.
Like the ARRS site said, there were hundreds of other people around the world doing the same to some degree, and somehow Ken found the time to compile them all and update the database weekly. When I think about the hundreds, maybe thousands, of hours I personally put into it and multiply that by how many other people were putting their time into it too, it really puts into perspective how priceless the database was. A lot of it could never be reproduced.
And I wasn't just a contributor. I used the database almost every day, both to research things for JRN articles and later in my work as an agent. I found the Marshfield New Year's Day Marathon in the ARRS database while looking for a race Yuki Kawauchi could do around the 2017-18 New Year's holiday when he was going to be spending a few days scoping the course of a bigger race in Massachusetts a few months later. And the rest is history.
In 2015 Ken launched a searchable version of the database thanks in part to collaborator Juraj Gasparovic that made it even more valuable. I couldn't have made the Inside the Outside documentary about the Fukuoka International Marathon without the info I got from the searchable database. In the last couple of years of his life Ken started expressing concern about what was going to happen after he passed, and when that day came in early 2018 the growth of the database slowed to almost zero. Juraj did what he could, but there was almost no way something done on a volunteer basis could keep going without the central person holding it all together with their pure passion.
I lost contact with Juraj in the 8 years since then, although I still used both versions of the database to some degree pretty regularly. I don't know what happened earlier this year, whether he just stopped paying to maintain a server, if the database sites were hacked, or what. Luckily the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine has archived the static version, and everything seems to be there, from Ageo to Marshfield. But only the landing page of the searchable version seems to have been archived and it doesn't work anymore.
There are other athletics databases out there like Tilastopaja and World Athletics, although WA's is full of intentional omissions that make it unreliable. But the ARRS database was full of interesting esoterica that neither of those touches. The Wayback Machine archiving part of it means it's not a complete loss, for now, anyway. But it really illustrates how tenuous the modern world is. Tens of thousands of hours of work by dedicated, passionate people to build something, in this case documenting the life work of tens of thousands of other people who'd dedicated their lives to the sport, and it can all just be memory holed in a second, apparently without anyone noticing.
I was at a party a year and a half ago and a friend asked why I've never moved JRN off of Blogger. I said it was because the editor window had a "Delete Blog" button and I could just get rid of it forever whenever I wanted. He said, "You can't do that, it's a 20-year archive!" I said, "Don't think of it as an archive. Think of it as a meditation on the transient nature of the human experience."
That was a joke, mostly, but the ARRS sites vanishing show the truth. Independent things like the ARRS, David's Race Results Weekly, JRN, these days pretty much any Youtuber, almost 100% rely on one dedicated, passionate person. At some point that's going to come to an end one way or another, and after that it's only a matter of time before all that work is gone. That's always been the case to some point, of course, but at least when physical media were still a thing that process took a lot longer. It's hard not to read into that and see the larger risks of the world we've built.
I'm just writing this off the top of my head and don't have a particular conclusion or message in mind, so I'm stopping here and having dinner. I do actually see JRN in a big part as an archive these days. I guess Google can just pull the plug on this platform at any time, in which case who knows. They've definitely made changes to the platform that make it harder to use, like everything else. But even though it's harder now to always put the time in every day, I don't have any plans to stop anytime soon. Or to push the button in the editor window.
© 2026 Brett Larner, all rights reserved
Comments