Saturday, September 01, 2012

Power of 10

Nothing planned today. Just an early night...

I stumbled upon this website recently. It's a UK database of running results and my profile can be found here

It seems that most UK results will be automatically included. I have submitted some of my recent performances from Ireland after they were verified by the site owners.

You can look up just about any runner who is registered with a UK running club. The really useful feature is the rankings that you can see at the bottom right hand side of the page. These are constantly updated each week so you can see how you fare against all the other runners in the UK.

Another really useful feature of this website is the partnership with RunBritian. If you click on the banner just above the rankings section it takes you through to this sister site. RunBritian have developed an algorithm that takes into account recent performances, race distance and terrain, age and course difficulty to calculate your running handicap (similar to a golf handicap). Most people will be in the range of 0 to 36 but it is possible to have a negative handicap (they describe this as the elites which is a bit of a joke as I'm only an old hack). My current handicap is -1.6 and this is recalculated after each race performance. Interestingly this places me 417th on the UK national ladder and 14th in the V40 age group.

Just looking at the top of the national ladder there are no surprises with Mo Farah and Andy Baddeley taking out the top 2 spots (handicaps of -6.2 and -5.7 respectively). For anyone who runs in the UK this is an excellent site and I'm surprised I haven't heard about it before. I'd be interested in any feedback if there are other people who have used these tools.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Very useful site to see if the people who finish around you in a race in the UK are better or worse than you on average. I once pipped a 3:44 1500 runner in a 10k!