FAQs and How-Tos
Frequently Asked Questions and How-Tos.
I found an error
Please submit a minor correction through the link at the bottom of the results page. Check you have selected the correct race and year, enter your position, then edit the name, club or category as appropriate.
If your time or position is wrong you will need to contact the race organiser - they have ultimate authority over timing.
The submission form wants me to answer a question to prove I'm not a bot. What if I get the answer wrong?
Don't be too worried. I'm not even sure we wired in any actual checks, so it's more of a pub quiz and minor deterrent to would-be saboteurs. If you learned something about Scottish hill running we'll call that a win.
What happens when I submit a request?
Your proposed correction is recorded for an administrator to approve when they get back down from the hill or back from the pub. Good practice to include a contact email or phone, just in case any clarification is needed. All going well, your correction should appear on the site within a few days.
I have some photos to share
We would love to have your photos! They can be from a particular race or event, a captivating landscape, or anything at all relating to Scottish hill running. Make sure you get permission first before submitting a photo with recognisable individuals.
The current upload process, via the admin site is being replaced with a simpler email-based ystem that won't require you to login; stay tuned!
My name changed
I changed my surname when I married, and now have results both under my maiden and married name. Can I get them to all appear together?
If there are only a few results that need correcting then consider submitting requests to change them individually. However, this gets tedious if there are more than a handful. So instead, we can add an entry to a table that is used to do this systematically.
We need to be careful of name clashes - all the system knows about is what's on the result sheet. So if someone else happens to have the same name as you, we could end up with collateral. In most cases, your name, club and years you were running under your old name are sufficient to uniquely identify you.
Let us know your maiden name, the club you ran under, and the years you have results. We will do the rest.
I recently divorced and want results under my married name to be changed back to my maiden name. Can you help.
Unfortunately, the mapping table only works one way. Oh, hang on - actually, it's kinda just the same? We can try it and see. Should work!
I don't want any of my results to appear on the website. Maybe I'm in a witness protection program, or have incurred some gambling debts, not that's it's any of your business. Can you help? GDPR says I have a "right to be forgotten"!
You certainly do. Bear in mind that your race results may also appear in other web sites of which we have scant knowledge and no control. But since we're one of the few sites that consolidates results, we have a particular responsibility here.
We will create an entry in the translate table to change your name to "Anonymous Athlete" or similar. Your position, time, category and club will remain - they are part of the statistical record of hill running and thus come under the category of lawful public interest.
Races and results
Result format
Race results need to follow a standard format in order to allow results from multiple years (and across multiple races) to be viewed together. Regardless of what spreadsheet format you submit results in, we always convert them to plain "CSV". This is the simplest, most easily processed and most robust format available for long-term archiving.
The spreadsheet headers should be: Position, Name, Club,
Category and Time. Optionally, you can split Name into two
columns, FirstName and Surname. Time should be hh:mm:ss or
mm:ss. We don't record fractions of a second. Category should be
"M", "F" optionally followed by an age; e.g. "M40", "F55", etc. Omit
the age for open category (i.e. no "M30"). For non-binary competitors,
use "NB" (or "A"; seems "A" is popular in Europe, but most folk have
no idea what it means so it's probably best avoided).
SHR recognises 5-year age steps past 50. So there is no "M45" but we do have "M55", "F65", etc. These are particularly important to get right for championship races, where prizes are at stake.
If a runner does not finish, it's usual to omit them from the results altogether - rather than recording them with a time of DNF.
Relays and team events
Teams
By team event, we're talking about a race where runners compete in pairs. The pair are expected to remain close to each other throughout the race, typically for safety reasons, and a single position and finish time is recorded for both runners.
Here's an example from Bruce's Crown:
| Position | Name | Team | Club | Category | Time |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Nicky Spinks | Tussocks Galore | Dark Peak | F | 11:21:00 |
| 1 | Emma Stuart | Tussocks Galore | Unattached | F | 11:21:00 |
| 2 | Joe Farnell | The Bogdashians | Lochaber AC | M | 12:00:00 |
| 2 | Despina Berdeni | The Bogdashians | Dark Peak | F | 12:00:00 |
| 2 | Lisa Watson | The Bogdashians | Unattached | F | 12:00:00 |
| 3 | Alasdair Meldrum | Alasdair Meldrum | Ayr Seaforth | M | 14:45:00 |
| 4 | Jo Scott | Team Flapjack | Fife AC | M | 15:38:00 |
| 4 | Ian Jones | Team Flapjack | Unattached | M | 15:38:00 |
| 4 | Pat Barlett | Team Flapjack | Interlopers | M | 15:38:00 |
| 5 | Alistair Shawcross | Alistair Shawcross | Unattached | M | 15:56:00 |
This format, with one additional column for Team (and repeated
Positions) allows mixed category teams, teams from different clubs,
and different size teams to all be recorded.
Relays
Relays are events run over multiple legs. They may also include one or more paired legs. So, "team" can have two meanings - the pair running a given leg, and the set of runners collectively covering all the legs.
The columns in the spreadsheet will be:
Position,Name,Club,Category,Time,Team,Leg
This format allows two runners for the same team to run the same leg and have their times recorded individually.
The course has changed from last year
Courses change. Sometimes the changes are temporary, such as a shortened bad-weather course just for one year. Some changes are minor, such as a diversion due to forestry operations. Or they can be major. Lomonds of Fife is a great example: the route changed completely in 2006, and again in 2026. But in all these cases we still think of it as the same race - same location (mostly), same time of year (mostly), same organising group (mostly), and (most important) same name.
If it's just a bad-weather course this year only, then put an *
after the year in the results file. E.g. 2026*.csv. This tells the
system to put these times after those for other normal years when
viewing results across multiple years.
Minor changes are fairly routine; there are so many factors at play with conditions on the day, runners taking a bad line or getting lost, etc. that gets absorbed into the normal variation.
Major, permanent route changes need an "eras" entry added to the race. If present, the user interface adds filters to display results just for that year range (e.g. "pre-2006", "2006-2025" and "2026-present"). Let us know, and we'll sort that.
My race is held more than once in a year
Are you thinking of the Krunce series perhaps? Or the summer and
winter variants of Aonach Mor? In these cases, it doesn't really work
to have a single 2026.csv file. Instead, add a suffix for each
occurrence; e.g. 2026-1.csv, 2026-2.csv, etc. for the Krunce
series, or 2026-w.csv for the winter edition and 2026-s.csv for
summer.
The calendar is wrong, or missing my race
Maintaining the race calendar is a chunk of work, so we have attempted to streamline this with a "perpetual" calendar for races we can see have been held on the same weekday/weekend over each of the past few years. For example, we have the Two Breweries recorded as "4th Saturday in September". Provided the race actually takes place (i.e. results for the current year are submitted to SHR) the calendar will automatically add the appropriate date for the upcoming year.
There is still a manual override we can use if you need to shift the race this once, and do let us know if the perpetual formula we derived gets it wrong. The system supports "N th DayName in Month", "Day after OtherRace", and absolute "N th of Month". If you have a race pinned to Easter, say, let us know and we can look at adding support for that also.
Junior races
I organise a junior race that takes place alongside the senior one. Do I need to create a new race page for this? The route is different, but the venue and date will be the same, as will most of the race information.
We are still refining how we manage junior races. They are an important part of Scottish Hill Running, and we want to make things as easy as possible. So any suggestions on how to improve things are most welcome.
By "junior" here we mean a race run over a shortened course by runners under the age of 18. This is not the same as "under 23" or "under 20" runners who run the same route as senior runners. Those runners are distinguished by their age category field, and their times can be directly compared to senior runners.
Our recommendation is to include the junior race as part of the main race entry. Add a section in the race information with specific instructions for juniors.
When results are submitted, do not include the junior results at the end of the main results spreadsheet. The SHR web site allows results from multiple years to be displayed and sorted, and it can be discombobulating when ten-year-olds start appearing with the fastest times!
Instead, submit separate results files for each junior race route. For
example, if you have a 2km course for the under-14s and a 500m course
for the under-8s then submit the results files as 2026-U14*.csv and
2026-U8*.csv. The trailing * indicates a shortened course from
usual, and is used to exclude these results when sorting the main race
results by time.
Note that a "U14" (etc.) category could denote either "under 14" or "14 and under" - your race, your decision. It appears to be standardising on "12-13", but whether age is defined at the date of the race, race series or start of year is unclear.
These results files are not yet incorporated into the junior championship pages, but we hope to do that soon.