RA Race Calendar (Read 1384 times)

OK so here’s my suggestion for an RA Race Calendar. It’s not meant to be an active.com style exhaustive list of every race that’s going on everywhere but more intended to be an add on to the forums to build on the social aspect of who’s running where. I guess I think of it as a slightly more structured version of the “Who’s running Boston this year” threads in the racing forum.

In a nutshell, each race has a thread and all the races are bundled up into one of two new forums:

• Upcoming Races, if they have not happened yet
• Past Races if they have.

Because RA would know the date of each race it would move the thread accordingly once the race has occurred.

Here’s how it would look….

At the top level, two new forums:

Once you clicked on them, each forum would look pretty much the same. A list of threads/races, giving you the key details of each event. As it’s primarily a forum, the default sort order would be last post, but users should have the ability to sort the threads by the “Date” column to allow them to see races in the order they are occurring.

Admittedly at this stage I have considered this for running only but you could set it up for different events (e.g. Triathlons) and change the icon accordingly.

Race threads would also integrate easily with “my topics”:

Races should be able to be created by anybody (like threads) and to a certain extent this is going to have to be self policing. E.g. if 2 people create a Boston 2012 thread then somebody ought to be able to delete the duplicate, either the OP or a moderator?

When you create a race it would look like this:

Now you can start to see the specific race info that would be added (date, distance, website etc..). There are probably others I have missed. At the bottom you can see the other key feature of the race thread; tracking attendees and participants and giving folks the option to state a goal and make an accompanying witty remark.

Once the race is created the thread would look like this:

RA users visiting the race thread can add their comments just like any thread, this allows for suitable discussion of post race beer, parking, monkeys etc.. In addition users can click one of the two buttons at the top to add themselves as  a participant or an attendee. They would get one of the following pop up boxes and be added to the appropriate list in the thread.

There are a bunch of details that have not been thought through here:

• How do folks change/remove their participation status?
• How does the OP update race details?
• This method would mean multi event races (e.g. Marathon/HM/10k events) would have 3 separate threads. Is that good?
• Can this be expanded to other types of events?
• There’s no link to the training plan/cal feature when people click “participate” – could/should there be?

All that said, I would love to see something like this on RA. I think in time the “Past Races” forum would become a kinda organized treasure trove of past race experiences. Want to know what parking was like at the national half last year, go back and look! More than anything it would be great to see who is racing the same events as you.

Don’t know what the rest of you think or if this is even possible.... eric?

Cheers MattJ

This is the BEST feature request I've ever seen at RA. I love the idea and hope that eric adds it to his list of features.

Yes!!!

I love the idea!  Particularly, the “Past Races” part.  My BFF and I have talked about doing a website like this for years.  We want details the race advertisement doesn't tell you - what's the course like, wha't the t-shirt like, what's the post-race food, etc.  The only changes in your idea that I think I'd want are the option to hide my participation in future races and to be able to filter by city as well as state.

This is the BEST feature request I've ever seen at RA. I love the idea and hope that eric adds it to his list of features.

Seriously.  How long did it take to write up this feature request?  And how much did Trent pay you?

This is a great idea.  I'd hope that the threads from upcoming races could be moved into past races after the race date.

Great idea!  Would really let everyone know where other RAers might be - there have been several races I've been at (smaller ones that aren't highly debated in the forums) where I found out after the fact that there were several RAers there - this would allow us to find them ahead of tiem and meet up.

And wow, very detailed description of how it should be set up.  nice work on that

Wow.  Nice job thinking this through and presenting it, Matt.   +1 from me.

Really great idea. Especially feedback on races. Can't tell you how much time I spend on the internets looking for little nuggets about "real details" for races (what the course is really like, things to look out for, level of support, etc.) and sometimes end up on random blogs or horrible one line active "reviews". RA'ers give the best feedback, and if there were a centralized place to collect and view that, would be super helpful and probably drive a lot of traffic here too.