If it weren’t for racing, I probably wouldn’t be a runner at all.

I clearly remember my first race, a 5-mile kickoff for the 2005 ING New York City Marathon. I remember feeling nervous but excited in the start corral near Tavern on the Green in Central Park. And then when the race started, I loved running with the mass of other runners through a partial loop of the park. After crossing the finish line, seeing my name, placement, and official chip time posted to the New York Road Runners website gave me a feeling of accomplishment. I loved that my effort made an indelible record. It was one line in a database, but it was there only because of my physical effort.

There was something about that record keeping that’s always been compelling to me. I continued running with New York Road Runners (75 races and counting including four New York City Marathons) and started to branch out into runDisney races, World Marathon Majors, and plenty of smaller races. I tried tracking all these race results in a spreadsheet, but it quickly became unwieldy and the limitations of a single table of data made it less fun work with. I had an idea for a more powerful database which could track all my race results and more. But I didn’t have the technical skills to make it happen at the time.

But recently the tools to create things with code have become more powerful and easier to use. I sketched out the idea for RaceDB and Google Antigravity brought it to fruition. As a hobby, I’ve been tweaking it, enhancing it, optimizing it, and of course running more races to add more records.

Check out my running stats to see my day-to-day training and all the states and countries I've run in. Or follow me on Strava, Instagram, Threads, YouTube, or Facebook.