Riley McLincha was known for a variety of talents in the Flint area – he was a poet, musician, songwriter, or more succinctly as Brandon Morgan, director of external relations for the Crim Fitness Foundation, refers to him, “He was kind of a renaissance man.”
To Crim participants, McLincha was known for another distinctive skill: “drubbling.” McLincha participated in 46 Crim races, usually while dribbling three basketballs at once through the entirety of the 10-mile course, which made him a beloved and iconic part of the race’s extensive lore.
But McLincha had another Crim-related skill that was a more behind-the-scenes talent. He painstakingly tracked 10-mile races results from the very first Crim. He provided records of those races from 1977 through his death in 2024.
“Riley spent thousands, probably tens of thousands of hours, going back and looking at results, and he kept a comprehensive database of all Crim results, but it was only 10-mile finishers,” Morgan said.
Now, as a way to honor both McLincha’s passion for the Flint race and to celebrate the vast history of the Crim as it approaches its 50th anniversary next year, the organization has unveiled the Riley McLincha Crim Participant Database. The web tool allows anyone interested in seeing how they’ve done in Crim races over the years to quickly search for their name and pull up a list of their results.
“His data only had the 10-mile, so it didn’t capture the 5-mile or what used to be the 8K, the 5K, the mile,” Morgan said. “We thought, how cool would it be to take Riley’s dataset that he manually created, and then add all of the data we have, which is all of the other finishers. It is just about 375,000 records now. So we have for the first time a fully searchable database of every Crim result going all the way back to 1977. So it’s kind of a way to not only do something cool for Crim 50, but honor Riley’s time and legacy in keeping all of those records alive for all those years so that we had them. Without his work, we would’ve had to start from scratch, and we had probably 80 percent of everything we needed to get going to build the database.”
To try it out, people simply need their name. It is based on names used during registration, so if a person has a maiden name, or registered under different first names at different times (like Robert, Bob, or Bobby), it might take an additional search or two to find everything, but the results pop up instantly.
“They can pull up every year they’ve run the Crim, see their result, their place, their time,” Morgan said.
Collecting that data was just an extension of one of the many things McLincha enjoyed about the Crim. It was also instrumental in helping the organization do things like track and start their milestone runner clubs because thanks to his data, they were able to see who had reached significant achievements in numbers of 10-mile races finished.
“He just kind of had this urge to crunch the numbers and track things down,” Morgan said. “I mean, he held the world record for memorizing Pi at one point. That’s just kind of how he was wired, you know? He loved having a table at the Crim Expo every year where people could come up and ask him, ‘How many Crims have I run? What years am I missing? How fast was I?’ So he loved the interaction with the people each year who would ask questions of him about his database.”
The race results aren’t the only thing that is now available online in the Crim archive. The organization also has pictures of race t-shirts and medals for every year of the race available for people to look back on. As they approach their 50th anniversary, they’re also adding other materials, including stories from some of the original runners, and they’re planning things like a commemorative book, museum exhibits, and more ways to celebrate what has become Flint’s signature event every year.
“We have a number of people who refer to it as, like, their Christmas, you know?,” Morgan said. “We see people extending family traditions multi-generationally, where grandma and grandpa, mom and dad, and kids are all in races from the 10-mile to the Teddy Bear Trot. We see people planning their family reunions around the Crim. We see people planning their corporate retreats and corporate volunteerism around the Crim. And so just to kind of see the Crim as a through line for the way people plan and think about their year, it’s part of their identity. We have volunteers who have been with us 40+ years. We have sponsors who have been with us 40+ years. We don’t have any shortage of stories. Everybody’s got a Crim story.”
This year’s Crim Festival of Races events are August 21-22. Registration is open online.
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