As a long-time runner, I was always frustrated by the number of locations that I would have to search to find events and then results. I always wanted a single place that I could go to find all of the upcoming events in an area and then afterwards to be able to get the results of the race. That frustration led me to create Athlete Guild. Originally, the idea was to create a website with postings of events and results. As a software engineer, I knew that I could create something that would work and be beneficial to runners. I figured that if I was frustrated then there were probably others as well.
That initial development effort started in 2009 and has slowly led us to where we are today. While we are definitely a great timing and event management company, our initial goal was always to serve the runner community and provide a one-stop resource for athletes. This has turned out to be a lot more difficult and expensive than I would have ever believed. The number of events today has grown many times over what it was in 2009. It takes a lot of time to research events and find information to post. You wouldn't believe how inadequate information is on some events. It's as if race directors don't really want you to come to their event. We used to try and post all of the information about an event, but we realized that information often changed on us and it became difficult to stay up to date. As a result, we now only post the basic info and provide you with a link to the official result posting. We would rather have all of the information available to you, but having the wrong information would do you no good. We do strive hard though to stay on top of the calendars. If there is an event you know of that is not on our calendar, then it has simply slipped by us. Please let us know and we will get it posted.
We are now striving to post results for all events as well. Initially we thought we would post the actual raw results so that it would link to your online profile, but we realized that timers are often changing results many days after the race due to timing or data errors. As a compromise, we are now posting links for all race results back to the timer result pages. This way you now have a one-stop location to go to find those results even though they are not actually on our website. Often times, participants have no idea who the timer was for a given race. This allows everyone to know that they can come to our site and find those results. We apologize if the results are sometimes delayed. Only Athlete Guild has the ability to post live results immediately onto our website. Everyone else must create static pages and post to their website. This can cause hours of delay. We know of our timers that can sometimes take two or three days after an event to get their results posted. We'll do our best but we can only post once we have a link.
We hope that these services will help you as a participant. As competitors ourselves, we want to make sure we provide the best service and support for the athlete community.
See you at the race!
