Committee News Update

Below you’ll find the latest news and updates from the AURA Committee, including the call out for a new webmaster, changes to the AURA site, online race results and rankings, and merchandise news.

AURA Website Volunteer Role

For the past two years, WA member Jeff Gray has been looking after the website and during his tenure, he performed a major site refresh (early 2016) and was responsible for regular updates ever since. Sadly for AURA, Jeff has advised that he no longer has the time to continue in this role. On behalf of the AURA committee, we extend our thanks for all the time and skill that he brought to the role.

We’re looking for someone new to take on the role of ‘AURA Webmaster’ with responsibility for maintaining and managing AURA’s website. Ideally you’ll have experience with maintaining a Wordpress site, but if you don’t have that, it’s no matter – we can teach you: an enthusiasm for ultra running and keeping our members informed is the key! You’ll need to devote 2 to 3 hours per week, and will work side-by-side on keeping content up-to-date with our Marketing Coordinator Kate Dzienis.

AURA Website Changes

On the weekend of October 13, the AURA website was given a major overhaul. This included a new look and feel to prepare for the online magazine launch, with the site now being much more mobile-device friendly. The event calendar has also been given a major overhaul with new search capabilities including an interactive map feature.

You may have already noticed that since the appointment of our Marketing Coordinator, news and feature articles are already being published to the website on a more regular basis. With the launch of this online magazine, we will be restricting a lot of our content to ‘members only’, which will require a login – if you’ve forgotten your login details, follow the prompts to retrieve your password (and use your membership number as the login).

Online Race Results & Rankings

AURA Treasurer Alexis Oosterhoff has entered into an agreement with the German Ultra Marathon Association (DUV) to act as the Australian representative to DUV and will be responsible for the entry of Australian ultra marathon event results into the DUV Ultra Marathon Statistics database.

The DUV database was first established in 2004 and stores results for more than 4,000 international events every year with more than 700,000 individual runner profiles. As part of this collaboration, the DUV team has provided AURA with direct access to its database, which AURA will use for automating the national ranking and points comp details.

This data-entry service will be provided to all ultra marathon events in Australia, regardless of their affiliation with AURA. Over the next few months, you can expect to see improved integration between DUV and the AURA website along with more regular updates to national rankings. We will also be looking at adding extensively to DUV’s database, using our own records that go back as far as the 1980s. As of writing, we have more than 1700 event results online! To access these results visit https://www.aura.asn.au/event-results/

As part of this initiative interim 2017 rankings can now be generated on-demand at the AURA Rankings Page https://www.aura.asn.au/records/rankings/. Note: rankings will be reviewed at the end of each calendar year.

Merchandise

Bling! It’s coming soon! For the past two years or so we’ve had a large stock of AURA-branded merchandise sitting in boxes just waiting to be sold. AURA Treasurer Alexis Oosterhoff has put his hand up to manage the merchandise for the time being. All the existing stock is on its way to WA where Alexis will conduct an inventory what we have and then make it available through an online store. The number of sales and interest from members will determine whether we replenish stocks and continue to offer merchandise in the future.

Rankings

Recent rankings were updated on 18 October and are accessible on the page here.