RunBritain rankings

wondered if anyone used this ranking system, and what they thought of it. Is it useful at all?

I'd love to know how it actually works as well...

Its pretty rubbish we've come to the conclusion...

Problems:

• it adjusts your times for weather conditions by taking into account everyone else's times versus their pbs and smoothing yours - this leads to under and over estimation depending on whether the other people in the race were in pb shape or running a tempo run for example
• its not accurate enough at the pointy end (some people have the same number say 4 but are actually widly different in standard)
• its actually quite tough for women to get a good score because it counts all runs in a year for a distance rather than by gender
• some people have minus scores as the baseline is not the current WR

Curly, if WAVA is compared to the world record, which I am never going to get near to in a zillion years, what's a reasonable percentage to be at?...or which percentage group would reasonable runners fall in?

Sorry, I realise that's a bit like asking 'how long is a piece of string', just interested in setting myself targets for improvement.

Saffy - I've always worked on the very rough guide that:

50% is most people or first year or running

60% is decent - involves some training

70% is county standard so pretty good (will pick up the odd parkrun win but not amazing)

80-85% is national standard (for women you can make some cash at this level with race wins)

90% + is international standard (you can probably make a living from it at this stage as a woman, but unlikely as a man as there are more of you).

I have worked hard to go from 49% to 70% in 2 and a bit years...it gets tougher as you get higher (ever decreasing return on investment basically), but a runner at a decent training level should expect to improve for 6-10 years believe it or not. 

It takes most people 8 years to reach their peak I've been told (from scratch)...I'm hoping to do it in 6 but I am relaxed about it taking longer if necessary

Everyone can work off their own idea of where they would like to be and dont forget that you can start with 5ks and then aim to balance your wava over the longer distances (which is more difficult). 

Am sure others will have different interpretations of course

Curly, that's great. Thanks very much . And  at your 49% to 70% in 2 years, very impressive !!

I dabbled with running for a couple of years, but started training 'properly' about 12 months ago. At 44 next month am I still likely to improve for at least 6 years? Having said that, I've recently noticed I've started to quicken so the first year of training is obviously starting to pay off.

Thanks for the help

Yep I would say that you are, but don't expect any progress to be linear... if you have a looksie around fetch you can see that people progress in wildly different ways (either because of training methods or rate of adaptation to the training or most likely both) and can often seem "stuck" for months on end.

Thats completely normal as far as I have experienced it. Often I get a breakthrough by either:

• adjusting my training load 
• changing my focus of racing distance

No problems - if you need any more particular help with training Q's one of the smart bods on the middle ground will be more than happy to help I am sure

(you may get more advice than you ever wanted mind )

Thanks Curly, that's interesting. The benchmarking is interesting, and you're right, if someone's not out for a PB it will tend to drag the benchmark down.

I had looked at the age grading, and think 50% a reasonable target right now. As my H kindly pointed out when I finished my first half, some people can run twice that far in less time.  I've found that by training for longer distances, I've also sped up over the shorter ones, but that's probably as I've never really trained properly before, just dabbled.

Did not work for me as it did not have any of the races I ran recently on it?

You can add them I think RB 

But most people will be better off getting on Po10 (you can set up a profile even if you are outside the rankings):

http://www.thepowerof10.info/user/newuserform.aspx

Since they dont adjust times

I quite like it but I know what you mean on the ranking. I am currently trying to get into the top 10 and stay in it for the most improved and I have not found it easy. I am currently on 2.9 improvement in June but i just smashed my 5k pb and my handicap didn't really lower much. Still quite a good site though.

Sorry to dig up an old thread! Is there something you have to do to show up in the rankings list on runbritain? I have an account there and on Pof10 which both have my results and runbritain gives me a ranking. I don't show up on the rankings list page though.