← ontrack lab
Oliver Fox
Founder of ontrack · doctor & researcher · runner
I founded ontrack. I trained as a doctor and now work mostly in research. I race, too: I've worn a GB vest at the European and World Cross Country Championships, came up through Cambridge University Hare and Hounds, and now turn out for Thames Hare and Hounds.
This is ontrack's lab. We use it to turn running data into something useful, and increasingly I use it to write about the sport and the science behind it.
Writing
- Who'd win? Rating British cross-country from finishing order aloneIn cross-country the clock is meaningless — different course, distance and mud every week — so the only thing that carries is who beat whom. We took 481,000 finishing positions from 29 English and Welsh leagues and built one head-to-head rating, so we can ask "would A finish ahead of B?" even for two runners who never raced each other, and "who was the best in the country in 2023?".
- The shape of British runningDraw a line between any two runners who lined up in the same race, across 850,000 results from 56 leagues and championships, and a structure appears: dense knots of clubs joined by bright bridges. Colour it by the network's own communities and the knots turn out to be regions. The map of who-races-whom is, quietly, a map of Britain.
- An atlas of ultrarunningWhere the sport lives, where it's fastest, and how a fringe pursuit became a global phenomenon — mapped across six decades and 27,000 races.
- When do ultrarunners actually peak?Across more than two and a half million ultra finishes, the age at which ultramarathoners are fastest is far later than the track would have you believe — right around 40 — and the decline on the far side is gentler than almost anyone admits.
- The world's fastest marathon courses532,375 finisher results, 14 marathons, and the 38,539 runners who raced more than one, used to settle which courses actually make you fast, and which only look that way because fast people show up.
- The world's hardest ultrasUsing 6.8 million ultramarathon results, we separate a course's real difficulty from the runners who show up — and the famous monster, UTMB, turns out to sit in the middle of the pack, while Hardrock and a handful of savage sky-races top the list.
- Britain's fastest tracksUsing every result on OpenTrack, we separate a track's genuine speed from the athletes who happen to race there. The venue matters most over distance, and the 10,000m shows exactly how the method can be fooled.
- Five million GPS pointsEvery GPS point my Garmin has recorded since 2014, drawn as the places I run, with a live view you can zoom all the way down to a single sample.