To read more about age-grading, click here, here or here
For 1st Place Sports' results page, click here.
This article is from the August-September 2006 edition of the Amelia Island Runners' newsletter, Runner's Hi!
“You’re not getting older, you’re getting better!”
Yeah, right. We’re all getting older, and sooner or later, if you get old enough, you get slower. It’s a fact of running life.
But here’s a lesser-known fact: As a runner, you really might be getting better, even if your race times aren’t. And there’s a way to tell, called age-graded scoring.
Never heard of it? You’re not alone. But here in Northeast Florida, its profile is being raised.
“Age-graded scoring is a great way to compare all runners on an equal basis,” says Doug Alred, owner of 1st Place Sports, which stages virtually all major races in the Jacksonville area. He recently started posting the age-graded results of some races alongside the conventional timing results on 1st Place Sports’ website.
“I have been playing around with age-grading for 10-12 years. It helps to motivate me to keep running,” says AIR member Bill Barnes, cross-country coach at West Nassau High School.
So, just what is age-graded scoring?
It’s basically an attempt to compare runners’ performances on an equal basis, regardless of age. It uses “age factors” and also “age standards,” which roughly correspond to world record times for the distance, age and gender. It’s based on data compiled and developed by the World Association of Veteran Athletes starting in 1989, and revised in 1994 — and again this year.
The idea is that while runners do slow down as they get older, their performance levels at age 60 might actually be higher than they were at age 25.
(The numbers also can compare performance levels for young runners. Factors and standards for both sexes are compiled for ages from 8 to 100.)
Age-graded calculators abound on the Internet. You plug in your age, gender, race time and race distance, and they’ll project what your time would have been in your running “prime.”
Perhaps more interesting, they’ll also rank your performance with a percentage number – say, 62%.
A score between 60 and 69 percent puts you at the “local class” level, meaning you’re a competitive runner in local races. 70-79 percent is “regional class,” 80-89 percent is “national class,” 90-99 percent is “world class” and 100 percent is, roughly, world-record level.
So if you enjoy running for speed, you can work at improving your “performance-level percentage” on an equal footing with everyone else, no matter how old you are.
“Although my training and racing times are declining, I still run the same amount of miles and I still get just as tired as always,” says Bill, who’s 59. “But it is discouraging to still be working hard at running only to see the gauge we use (time) decline. By using the tables, it lets me compare my effort with all the other efforts I’ve had, factoring out Old Man Time.”
Bill says it’s satisfying to do races like the River Run over the years and see that even when his actual times decline, his age-graded times are fairly consistent. It also reinforces his own knowledge of his conditioning efforts: “If my training is off, it shows up in the times.”
The percentage rankings are the ones you’ll find with the race results at www.1stplacesports.com, for races that are part of the annual Grand Prix series. For now, runners who score 60% or higher are being listed, though “we will probably go to full results with the start of the 2006-2007 season,” says Doug Alred. The first race in that season series will be the Carrabba’s Summer Beach Run on Aug. 26 at Jacksonville Beach. “We are planning on adding some prize money to a few events based on age-graded performance,” Doug adds. But even without a financial incentive, age-graded scoring can pay dividends in the age-old race against time.