The Ascent – the Data Behind Trail

Martin Biela built a tool that tracks week-over-week movement in the UTMB Index Top 100. From his introductory blog post:

I’ve been having fun with data ever since I watched Moneyball in 2011. And I think Germany has built the coolest fantasy manager out there for football — Kickbase. Once you’ve spent a season comparing market values, point multipliers and starting-eleven probabilities, you don’t watch the Bundesliga the same way again.

I’ve was invited to play Kickbase last Bundesliga season and I sucked at it. So, I might not be the target audience for this amount of data, but here’s what Martin says ‘The Ascent’, which lives on uphillnotes.com is and does:

The Ascent is a live view of the UTMB Index Top 100. Two date pulldowns, a Top 10 table, movers, country and continent splits. You pick two weeks and see at a glance who climbed, who fell, who’s new in the Top 100, who dropped out.
…
Index runs on the most contemporary calculation in the sport: expected score instead of plain averages, a stability score, heavier weighting of performances on similar course profiles, a clear recency bias. If I’m going to read movement across weeks, I want to read it on the best available data — and that’s the new Index.

Another massively ambitious tech tool that’s coming for trail. But man, I wish the AI user interfaces would be a bit more diverse and not look all the same – I suppose these designs AI churns out are the WordPress themes our generation of builders fought against. But I don’t want to be a complainer, I’ve been asking for more data, with the hope for our media to tell better stories that are based not just on gut – and personal friendship – but on the accessibility and visualization of data points that define our sport. At a glance it seems these tools currently are just reinforcing what we already tool, but I shall be patient and understand that take time to get the data injected to build up the historical context. For example at this point – today – the tool lists global runners and German runners, no other country is broken down. And we can see that Martin Nilsson was the biggest Index number climber, but we can’t click on his name to see what race he ran, or what made the points jump. It’ll be interesting to see how this will evolve and I am looking forward for someone to take ‘The Ascent’ tool and find that gem of a storyline we’ve been missing.