SB Running

February 20, 2004 - Running Man (& Woman)

It is heading toward the end of February. And the question must be asked … how are you doing on those New Years resolutions? Are you watching less TV? Reading more books? Talking less on the cell phone while you drive? Have you lost weight? And what about the book you were going to write, the language you were going to learn, or the marathon you were going to run? It shouldn’t seem so hard. Other people do it, don’t they?

The dedicated staff of edhat.com wanted to find out just how many Santa Barbara people actually do run. Our criterion for being a runner was that a person had to be from Santa Barbara, and they had to have entered at least one official race in Santa Barbara last year.

Race results are freely available on the web from Santa Barbara Athletic Association and Active.com. A tech-savvy member of the dedicated staff who has lots of experience ‘scraping’ data from other web sites wrote a little program to read the results from these sites and save them into a central database. Our program worked like a charm, and in no time, the data was safely and legally secured. Then, we did two things:

1) We counted the number of unique names with Santa Barbara addresses.

2) We built an easy-to-use web site so any Santa Barbara runner can keep track of their race times and compare them to others.

You can see this application at http://www.edhat.com/races

As they say in the white sheets: it is a state-of-the-art interactive, best-of-breed, disruptive technology application that minimizes workflow inefficiencies and eliminates redundant processes. It is carb-free, too!

Check it out ... enter the names of runners you know. Be aware that there are some pretty awesome runners in this town. Completing races is challenging enough, finishing in the top half of a division is awesome.

We summarized the data below. Overall, there are slightly more female runners than male. However, among the over-40 crowd, males outnumber females. Interestingly, this breakdown is the exact opposite of the overall population of Santa Barbara where there are slightly more males in the younger group, and many more females in the older group. Does any one know why this is? We would love to hear from edhat subscribers about this.

Santa Barbara Runners

Santa Barbara Population

Percentage of Runners

Age

M

F

T

M

F

T

M

F

T

0-9

34

27

61

10,178

9,796

19,974

0.3%

0.3%

0.3%

10-19

125

123

248

12,775

12,869

25,644

1.0%

1.0%

1.0%

20-29

325

465

790

18,868

17,556

36,424

1.7%

2.6%

2.2%

30-39

410

484

894

13,083

12,375

25,458

3.1%

3.9%

3.5%

40-49

321

293

614

12,544

12,723

25,267

2.6%

2.3%

2.4%

50-59

148

103

251

9,325

9,717

19,042

1.6%

1.1%

1.3%

60-69

55

18

73

5,662

6,247

11,909

1.0%

0.3%

0.6%

70-79

8

8

16

4,575

6,091

10,666

0.2%

0.1%

0.2%

80-up

1

0

1

2,613

4,897

7,510

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

Total

1,427

1,521

2,948

89,623

92,271

181,894

1.6%

1.6%

1.6%

As the chart shows, there are 2,948 total runners. Entries in our daily contest ranged from 123 to 30,000! The closest was a subscriber named Water (short for running water?) with a guess of 2500. Water wins a prize of choice from the edhat.com prize bag, maybe he/she will see a movie on us … Run Forest, Run!

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