I seem to be recognizing more and more people at the races I am running. At first, people would come up to me and say "I remember seeing your 'We Will Not Fail' sign on your shirt at ...". I thought It was amazing that I kept seeing familier at places. I saw the Crazy Squirrel Lady from Hartford, MCM and Boston, then Ben Navarrete in Detroit, LA, and NJ, got an idea:

Get a list of all the people who ran all the races I've run, and sort through them.

So I wrote a program that hit MarathonGuide's Database, and grabbed the data, and parsed it.

Massaging it took some time. Firstly, races gather different and report race data differently. Secondly, Alot of people seem to have the same name. And races dont always use the same spelling of peoples names. And there are II's and Jr's. And they move. And there are a lot of people who run the monsters of NY, Chicago, Marine Corps and Boston. Yikes.

I figured it was no big deal to run one Marathon with someone, and I wouldn't display someone that ran only the monsters with me...

The algorythm looks something like this:

	For each race that I have run

		For each runner in that race

			For each race after the current one

				For each runner in that race

					If I havent looked at this runner for this race

						And this name equals that name

						And the the age of this runner is circa that runner's age

							Print him out and Add him to the list



	Its more efficient than this, as it keeps track of where in the alphabet

the names really are, which is about 500x faster then this brut force method.

I looked at about 300000 runners in 59 races and found approximately 19000 people that I have run more 2 or more with. Here is the top, with 10+ (19 of them)...

Here's the whole list. (Caution: 4.1 meg).

Ben Navarrete comes in with only 7.