As a runner, I'm interested to know how my performance today compares to my performance from 10 years ago. Obviously, I've slowed down in raw numbers, but did I run better or worse for my age? Age-grading does that to an extent, but you're compared against the world record, which isn't as helpful as being compared to your past self.
As a race director interested in calling out top performances, I'd like a way to see who ran notably well for themselves, even if their raw time was middle or back of the pack. For example, if Alexander Simpson wins the mile in 4:30 (versus his 4:19 PR), that's probably less impressive than Tonya running 6:55 at age 57 to finish in the middle of heat 4.
I'm wondering if we can come up with some sort of event-based Lifetime Performance Index or Age-Graded PR (it should have a good name), which would set the 100% standard at the person's age-grade PR and would compare other efforts to that standard. It seems easiest and most relevant to do this for track, where events are all comparable, but I could imagine extending it at some point in the future to all our races, so you could see how your efforts at the Thom B course, for instance, might change over time.
So, if I set my mile PR with a 4:47 at age 48, how does every subsequent mile result compare to that effort? I'd like to be able to sort my mile efforts by this index so I can see where in time my best efforts came.
Given that our data is by definition limited, it might be worth having a way for people to enter a PR from outside our data set.
Happy to chat about this soon to flesh out the idea, but I wanted to get you thinking about it.
As a runner, I'm interested to know how my performance today compares to my performance from 10 years ago. Obviously, I've slowed down in raw numbers, but did I run better or worse for my age? Age-grading does that to an extent, but you're compared against the world record, which isn't as helpful as being compared to your past self.
As a race director interested in calling out top performances, I'd like a way to see who ran notably well for themselves, even if their raw time was middle or back of the pack. For example, if Alexander Simpson wins the mile in 4:30 (versus his 4:19 PR), that's probably less impressive than Tonya running 6:55 at age 57 to finish in the middle of heat 4.
I'm wondering if we can come up with some sort of event-based Lifetime Performance Index or Age-Graded PR (it should have a good name), which would set the 100% standard at the person's age-grade PR and would compare other efforts to that standard. It seems easiest and most relevant to do this for track, where events are all comparable, but I could imagine extending it at some point in the future to all our races, so you could see how your efforts at the Thom B course, for instance, might change over time.
So, if I set my mile PR with a 4:47 at age 48, how does every subsequent mile result compare to that effort? I'd like to be able to sort my mile efforts by this index so I can see where in time my best efforts came.
Given that our data is by definition limited, it might be worth having a way for people to enter a PR from outside our data set.
Happy to chat about this soon to flesh out the idea, but I wanted to get you thinking about it.