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Comment by neonkiwi | Hacker News Reader

This is an interesting analysis of available data for runners and record-breakers, outlining what will have to happen to break the two-hour mark for marathon times. Dennis Kimetto set the marathon record this year at 2:02:57.

Cue complaints about scrolling behavior of this site, but the content itself is worth reading.

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Your comment caught my attention, because I don't have any problem with the display of the content. Then, I immediately realized: I do not have Javascript enabled from runnersworld, thanks to the NoScript Firefox extension.

I temporarily turned it on, and saw the annoyances.

The static view without JS is just fine: the graphs and their labels are all there; nothing moves when you scroll.

>'...the content itself is worth reading.'

It sure looks that way and I'm normally pretty tolerant of design flourishes, but I find this simply unbearable.

Still, I really wanted to read this, but neither Pocket, Readability nor Instapaper are able to pull more than a few paragraphs of usable text out of it.

The design isn't just bad or annoying it's hostile.

In addition to my observation that disabling JavaScript from runnersworld.com stops all the effects while evidently showing all the content nicely, I'd like to add that the page renders very nicely in the print view of the FireFox add-on known as "Print Edit". "Print Edit" lets you trim out superfluous junk from the document, and then print it or save a copy.

I thought the scrolling behavior was nice. Seeing a long article can be distracting if you're not interested in the topic and check its length. Having a single paragraph or element load as you scroll looks like an intentional design concept to prevent this.

Huh. works great for me in Safari on OS X - and normally I'm the first to complain about poor site behavior (particularly animated gifs which Safari is terrible with).

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