Ancient Results

Nationally or for particular LMSC(s)?

Be specific. There has to be some nut-job who saves old results. As a long time runner, I've kept some road race results from as far back as the mid 70s. People have called me the local running historian.

If you go to Events & Results in the USMS home page you can find results from USMS Nationals back to 1970.

I could not find state them results for 2001 -2 in Illinois.

I believe I have the CMSA (Illinois) state meet results from that period. The problem is that they were never uploaded. It's a challenge to upload them now, as getting permanent ids for people who, in the intervening years, have changed their name or didn't swim any USMS meets after the permanent id system was put into place, is quite difficult. I uploaded (or at least tried) the 2006 state results. Wasn't easy.

Now that things have been narrowed down a bit, I'd start with the top ten recorder for the North Texas LMSC. Then check with the long-time members of the LMSC. Someone will probably recall a "nut-job" who saved that stuff. There's a guy here in Illinois who had printed out all sorts of meet results and had 'em in several folders in his home office. I also heard of an older guy in Minnesota or Wisconsin who had been active in Illinois BITD.

Be specific. There has to be some nut-job who saves old results. As a long time runner, I've kept some road race results from as far back as the mid 70s. People have called me the local running historian. yeah, specifics! thanks for the reminder. i'm interested in Short Course Nationals, 1995, and 2003, and in South Central Zone/North Texas LMSC. thanks for replies- and yeah, it was my thought too that some nerd would have preserved old results from the way back and long ago....

yeah, specifics! thanks for the reminder. i'm interested in Short Course Nationals, 1995, and 2003, and in South Central Zone/North Texas LMSC. thanks for replies- and yeah, it was my thought too that some nerd would have preserved old results from the way back and long ago.... All USMS Nationals results are online: 1) go to usms.org 2) mouse over the red "Events & Results" tab 3) click on "National Championships" under the "Pool" category 4) the resulting page is: www.usms.org/.../nationals.php 5) scroll WAY DOWN on that page; they're all there back to 1970

I stopped looking as others had tried to find our team total for the state meet for that year with out finding the final total for our team.

No, not easy, it's a lot of work no matter how you slice it. I did it for many old running events. I started by badgering several old-timers who I knew were pack rats and might have old results stashed away. Once I had a hard copy, I ran it through ABBY FineReader, an optical character recognition app. Even then with really poor copy you will have to make a lot of manual edits since you can see far better than the OCR. This isn't usually a problem until you get into the early 80s. Then I used an app called TextPad to do word frequency counts across multiple files to find matches in names. Still, there's some deduction needed with name, location and age to determine if they are the same people. The difficult ones are women who change their surnames. You simply have to know them to get that right, or once again pick the brains of the old-timers. You'll get it 99% correct, but have to invest many hours.