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2004 Pikes Peak News Archives
2003Current trail conditions (during the running season) can be found in the news section of the Incline Club page. 9/8/03 The [PPA/M results search moved to pikespeakmarathon.org in 2015] program has been updated and improved! You can now sort your results by any one of several fields including; Asc pos, Mar pos, Asc time, Dec time, Mar time and race year. You can also click the heading of those results columns and sort them on the fly. The search also generates a link to use if you want to link to, or e-mail your results. 9/6/03 I opened a can of worms by linking names in the results to results database because I started getting quite a few requests to fix names so that all their results would show. This gave me the incentive to go through the whole database (currently 49,881 names) to find as many multi-year runners as possible. This task took almost 15 hours!!! Of the 12,043 female results 338 changes were made or 2.8%. Of the 37,838 male results 964 changes were made or 2.5%. No, I did not count them. However I did write a program that keeps track of changes and then updates all the affected results pages automatically! Very slick if I do say so myself. I would guess that about 90% of the changes were just adding middle initials that were inconsistently used. However with this many names in the database middle initials are VERY important to help distinguish between people with the same first and last name. The next most popular change was accounting for all the variations on first names like the one runner who started out as Bobby, changed to Bob and now uses Robert. Billy, Bill and William also seem to go through this change as well. The toughest change from a philosophical standpoint was changing last names of women who have married or divorced. However I talked to about 10 women I knew that had name changes and they all agreed with the change so that all their results would show with one click. At any rate, I hope I did not offend anybody with the changes I made but the database is now the cleanest it has ever been. In fact, I found 3 more females that were listed as males (one in the 2003 results no less) and a male that was listed as a female. Also several more people now show up on the streakers page with 15 or more runs. If you find this stuff as interesting as I do PLEASE register using a consistent name and if your name is the same as someone else’s add a middle initial! 9/5/03 Billy D Lese’s 2003 marathon story was added to the Pikes Peak Central. He has done a boatload of races but this one had him in tears. 8/29/03 A total of 53 “things done right/things done wrong” stories from the 2003 races were added today. 8/26/03 I have received so much positive feedback on the hyperlink feature on the 2003 results that I wrote some code to add the feature to the past results as well. It is neat to be able to select a runner and instantly see how they did other years. As one user put it, “It’s addictive!” 8/22/03 Two first person race accounts were added to Pikes Peak Central. Both Bill Wright and Jonathan Vigh have very complete reports. Jonathon’s report also contains some of the best photos taken during the race I have ever seen as far as seeing runners stretched out over the final couple of miles. Not sure what to think about him taking 20+ minutes on the summit to take more photos however... Bill on the other hand is going for every second he can! 8/19/03 All the stats are updated and available off of the results archives page. [PPA/M results moved to pikespeakmarathon.org in 2015] 8/18/03 The 2003 PPA/M/D results have been added to the archives. [PPA/M results moved to pikespeakmarathon.org in 2015] If you are like me you love to see what people have done in past years. New on the results pages for this year are hyperlinks for runners who have raced Pikes in the past. This should be a lot of fun - enjoy! Over the next several days I will be updating all the stats pages. Be patient because as you know there are a lot of them.
8/5/03 The following was sent to me for the Incline Club newsletter. It seems even more appropraite here:
Setup of the Incline Aid Station
Setup of the Cirque and A-Frame Aid Stations 7/13/03 BTMR results have been posted. One of the neat ways to use the results is to look at the splits of other runners to see how they paced themselves to Barr Camp. This, in conjuction with the pace calculator, can really help when it comes to setting goals for the PPA/M/D. 6/1/03 A story I wrote about the new PPA/M/D registration policy came out today in Springs Magazine. If you have not been to the TCR’s site in a while they have put out a news release that they are holding 40 spots for top runners based on bio. What an awesome piece of news for sure! 5/16/03 Registration for the 4th annual Barr Trail Mountain Race began yesterday. The race will be run on July 13th making it the perfect tune-up run for the Ascent and Marathon to be run 5 weeks later. 5/6/03 THE RESULTS ARHCIVES HAVE BEEN COMPLETED!!! Valerie Prothe e-mailed me the 1973 results and they have been added to the results archives. [PPA/M results moved to pikespeakmarathon.org in 2015] It has been a long 5 plus years since the archives were started but it has been more than worth it! My interest in building the archives started in 1993 when I came across the ascent time for marathon record holder Lynn Bjorklund. Turns out she also had the fastest Ascent time ever ran as well but it was not being counted as the record and I wondered if there were others. Over the next couple of years I did find 2-3 more errors by looking at paper copies of past results but this was hit or miss at best. However I did not get serious about building a results database until after the 1997 race when a runner just missed setting an age-group by 15 seconds because he was chasing the incorrect time listed in the record books. That story got mentioned in the newspaper (see 8/17/1997 news post). At any rate, since I had done the typesetting for almost all TCR results from 1991 - 1995 I had several years of results on disk and on 9/1/97 seven years of results were posted to this site. My first goal was completed 3 and a half years later when all the results back to 1976 were finished and posted on 4/9/2001. 1976 was the year of the last course change which started a new round of course and age-group records. Having all the races back to then in the computer allowed me to find at least 13 errors in the record books which were then corrected by the TCR. Now, 2 years later, all 47 years and the 1936 Pikes Peak Foot Race have been posted on this site and are in the [PPA/M results search moved to pikespeakmarathon.org in 2015]. The early years were important to me to get up just for the sake of preserving the history of this great race — the 4th oldest marathon in the USA and 11th oldest in the world. Also because of the results database I was able to create pages like the streakers page, the doublers page, record progressions, 1-year age group records and even state records. [PPA/M results moved to pikespeakmarathon.org in 2015] Simply, without a computer database of past results some of these stats would be next to impossible to create! Finally, I would like to thank some of the people who have helped get the results archives done! The following people hand input results for the archives; Paul and Judy DeWitt, Steve Gaulk, Keith Grimes, Tim Hicks, Keith Lonnquist, Jeff Miller, Valerie Prothe and Rick Rastall. These people helped get me electronic copies of some of the more current years; Bill Bennet, Elliott Henry, Dave Sorenson and Sid and Liz Steinweg. Also a special thanks to Dennis Kavanaugh, Rick Trujillo, and Ken Young for sending my paper copies of some of the older results and John Rose for his book Foster Sons of Pikes Peak which had most of the early results listed. 3/1/03 The 1972 results have been added to the results archives. [PPA/M results moved to pikespeakmarathon.org in 2015] Now only 1973 remains to be input to complete the archives:-) 2/13/03 Valerie Prothe e-mailed me the 1974 results and they have been added to the results archives. [PPA/M results moved to pikespeakmarathon.org in 2015] Now only 2 years (1972 and 1973) remain to complete the archives:-) 2/10/03 4 more medals and coins were added to the Pikes Peak Medal collection. 1/24/03 The Arkansas Pikes Peak Marathon Society has started a yahoo groups site at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/APPMS
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