Proving Your Race Time

Did you know there is a website that can track your races? I discovered Athlinks when I found out my time at the Buffalo Marathon last year qualified me for a guaranteed spot in the Chicago Marathon for 2019.

I knew I had to prove my time but had no idea how to do that.

The marathon application for Chicago included a place to link your Athlinks account. This website/app will “find” all your races (well, most of them…they didn’t “find” 2 half-marathons I did a few years ago) and add them to your profile.

You then have them all in one handy place and can link them to applications if a race wants your information.

I had never heard of this site since none of the races I’ve ever done had a qualifier. It was frustrating for a few minutes, while I tried to work out how I was supposed to “prove” my time in a way that would be accepted.

The marathon application itself didn’t really help, except for referring to Athlinks as a way to send them the times from the qualifying race.

Athlinks

Head over to athlinks.com and sign up (it’s free). They will walk you through the process of finding your races (it’s not hard…pretty automatic) and then you will have a profile.

You can check out your stats…it will list your PR’s, all races and results and you can follow certain runners/rivals, etc.

You can also look up athletes, and see their results as well.

If you ever think you will run a race that has a time qualifier, I would suggest you set up your Athlinks account. It’s actually pretty cool to have all your races in one spot, to see your times.

Using the App

When you run races, people always ask you what your time was. The Athlinks app can be right on your phone so you can refer to it immediately. I sometimes mix up my times, and refer to it more than I thought I would!

It is also great when you are using various online calculators for what paces you should run for different workouts. A lot of calculators are more accurate if they can use the results of two recent races and it’s nice to be able to just open the Athlinks app on my phone and have everything in one place.

Since I already set my account up a few months ago, I used my husband’s name and set up an account for him, which you can see how easy it is to do in the video below.