I wanted a lot of old NYRR race data to play with.
Prospect Park Track Club used a site called RunGraphs pretty consistently. It pulled public race results together and made them easier to look through. I liked the tool. I also had a little club project in mind and wanted the raw data behind past races.
The code was no longer public on GitHub.
I did not know the runner who built it, but we had shared friends. I found his email and asked if he would share the scraper.
The request was very specific. I had found an old repository reference to a NYRR scraper built with Mechanize. If he did not see it as commercial work, and sharing it would not create an issue with NYRR, it could save me a bunch of time.
I also tried hard not to sound like a random person asking a stranger for his work.
“Just thought I would reach out runner to runner :).”
I told him the project was non-commercial. I offered to hand over any derivative work or give him access to whatever I built. Then I included my Strava and LinkedIn profiles to prove I was “not a completely random person / email troll.”
There was one more boundary worth spelling out. I worked for a fitness startup in New York. This was not a company request and I was not going to use his software at work.
The whole email was long for a code favor, but I wanted the intent to be clear.
He replied in less than an hour.
The original scraper had been for the old NYRR site. The RunGraphs repository used the newer one. Both repositories were private now, but he was willing to add me. He only needed my GitHub handle.
I sent it back:
“thechrisfischer.”
That was the start of the little project. No pitch deck. No company. No commercial plan. I wanted to mess around with running data for the club, and another runner saved me from rebuilding the first part.