Here at YVAA we love head-to-head racing. But lives are busy and Yorkshire’s big, so sometimes people find it difficult to make it to our championship races. So we want to offer a way for our athletes to compete with each other without having to be in a specific place at a specific time.
We’re therefore launching the Yorkshire Vets’ Virtual Rankings. Here’s the format:
We have a range of 7 recognised distances or groups of distances:
- Any one of 800m/1500m/1 Mile
- Any one of 5000m/5k
- 5 Mile
- Any one of 10000m/10k
- 10 Mile
- Half Marathon
- Marathon
Athletes are invited to submit their fastest race times this year at any of these distances. The times you submit need to be from organised races with results published online, not just any old Strava activity.
Each race time will be given an age-grade using WMA standards. That means you’ll get points based on how your time compares to the world record for your age and sex. This allows all runners, younger and older, male and female, to compete with each other on an equal footing.
Your overall score will be the sum of your best age-grades at 4 different distances for team rankings, or 5 different distances for individual rankings. So you can’t do well by just running short or long races, you need to show some range, but you don’t need to race every distance to max out your score.
As we’d like to see people going up and down the standings throughout the year, we don’t want people hoarding results and then submitting them all on New Year’s Eve. Race times will therefore have to be submitted within 30 days of the race. N.B. As we’re starting mid-year, this rule will only kick in once people have had a chance to catch up, so until the end of August you can submit any time you’ve run this year.
At the end of January 2023, we’ll be able to see who our top-ranked athletes of 2022 were, who had the best year.
Alongside the individual results, we’ll also publish club results:
- Mixed Team: Teams of 6, made up of the club’s best runner in each of the following categories: M35-49, F35-49, M50-59, F50-59, M60+, F60+.
- Teams of 3 runners from the same club in each of the following categories: M35-49, F35-49, M50-59, F50-59, M60+, F60+.
To sign up, please use the registration form at https://forms.gle/8H1Pghib5PfCa7he8.
You can then submit performances using the form at https://forms.gle/2DFzUTZEFxzMiKdk7.
You can check the rankings at any time at: https://docs.google.com/…/1nzNjSFSdL-goRZXOpC7ogTo7VR…/.
FAQ
Who can take part?
Eligibility criteria are the same as for our championships: any athlete who’s over 35 and either a member of a YVAA-affiliated club or affiliated to YVAA as an individual can take part.
You don’t have to regularly attend our in-person events to join in; in fact, we hope this will draw in some athletes who find it difficult to get to those, or who just have other priorities.
N.B. If you’re affiliated to YVAA individually, rather than via your club, please select “Other” as your club when you register. We’ll edit this manually later.
Which races are eligible?
Your performance needs to be over the right distance and verifiable, but we understand that not all races are licensed or run on certified courses. So, you can submit your performance if:
- It’s an organised race with results published online.
- You know the course length is either accurate or over-distance. This may be because it’s on a certified course, or it was run on a track, or you have a reliable GPS watch which measured it as at least the advertised distance.
- You know it was accurately timed, because there were no known issues and your official time is close to your watch time.
If you run an off-road or uncertified race and your watch says it was under distance, don’t submit. If there were timing issues and you know your official time isn’t right, don’t submit. If a performance looks dubious we can exclude it, but hopefully everyone will play fair so there’s no need to get officious about it.
Gun time or chip time?
It’s 2022, so chip time where available.
What if I submit a time and then improve on it?
If you think you may have run a better time than one you’ve already submitted, submit your new time. If it gives you a better age-grade it will over-write your earlier submission. Bear in mind that age-grades will be calculated using your age on race day, so if you have a birthday then a slightly slower time might still get you a better age-graded score. If in doubt, submit.
I’ve submitted my time but it isn’t showing? What should I do?
This means your performance hasn’t been matched with your registration, probably because of a typo. We’ll periodically check through submissions and try to fix anything like that, but feel free to get in touch through the contact form if you’re worried.
Will there be prizes?
At this stage, this is just a fun experiment, so there’s no plan to award prizes. But we’ll see what engagement is like and review this.