The start of Race Roundup

I’m embarking on a new personal hobby project, to collect and categorise all publicly available data I can access related to running races.

For reasons mentioned previously, I think now is an incredible time to embark on such a project.

My plan is to start with existing data standards, notably the OpenActive and Open Athletics data models, and expand from there as necessary.

So far, I’ve mapped out 67 possible data points to collect about each and every event. This includes standard stuff like title and description, going through to more esoteric entries like timing method and whether the course is looped.

These will then get mapped across to the defined terms in the vocabularies mentioned above.

The aim: Collect all of the running events, with as many fields populated as possible

The purpose: Not sure yet, at a minimum to be published as a data feed for developers to consume, but ideally also turned into the go-to site for all, and I mean all, running events you may want.

Possibly some sort of social angle on top of this to share events you plan on attending with friends, given that you should be able to add your entire event calendar to this system.

Possibly some Fediverse angle down the line too, allowing events to automatically show up in your preferred reader.

To start with, I’ll be focusing on UK events. But once the techniques have been ironed out, I don’t see why I couldn’t expand further afield, other than possible language barriers slowing down debugging problems with the system.

I’ll update this page once I have something publicly facing to show off.