| AGE GRADED G.P. STANDINGS | RANKINGS BY BEST PERFORMANCE Coming Soon! |
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In addition to the regular grand prix standings, which are calculated
based on point for the top ten runners in each division,USATF/CT has begun keeping age-graded rankings as well.
Many of you may wonder what are age graded rankings and why use them.
If you think you understand age grading and want to go directly to the description of how USATF/CT is using them, click here Age grading tables were first developed by the World Association of Veterans Athletes (WAVA) in 1989. The goal was to be able to compare any performance at any distance by an athlete of any age or any sex. For example, we all can assume that a 20:00 5K by a 60-year old male is superior to a 20:00 5K by a 25-year old male. But what about a 20:00 5K for a 60-year old compared to a 16:30 5K for the 25-year old? Or a 20:00 5K for the 60-year old compared to a 42:00 10K for the same 60-year old? There are millions of possible comparisons. Using the open world records as a starting point, WAVA researched many thousands of performances and came up with a performance factor for each distance and each age from 30 to 90. By multiplying the performance factor by the performance in any given race, you can determine the equivalent open time, or Age Graded Time for that runner. Using our earlier example, the performance factor for a 60-year old male in the 5K is .8193. If we take the 5K time of 20:00, which is 1200 seconds, and multiply it by .8193, we get 983 seconds, or 16:23. So the Age Graded Time for this performance is 16:23 and would be superior to the 16:30 time by the 25-year old. This method works great for determining who had the best performances in a given race. But this method does not allow us to compare performances as different distances. There is a second way to use the age grading tables, which is the way that USATF/CT is using them. In addition to containing a performance factor for each age, sex, and distance, the tables contain the open world record for each distance. Instead of multiplying the performance factor by the race performance, as indicated above, you can DIVIDE the open world record by the performance factor for a given age. The result will be the Age World Record for that age. Note that this is not the actual age world record - it is what the age world record SHOULD be if it was an equivalent performance to the open world record. You then divide this age world record by the performance in a given race, to get the Age Graded Percentage for this performance. If you do this for every performance in a race, the performance with the highest percentage will be the best performance. Not only that, but now you can compare Age Graded Percentages between different distances. Let's see an example of how this works. Using our 60-year old who runs 20:00 for 5K, we can now calculate his age graded percentage. First, we need to calculate the Age World Record for 5K for a 60-year old male. We take the open world record, which is 12:58.4 (or it was when the tables were last updated) and divide it by the age 60 performance factor of .8193. The result is 950 seconds, or 15:50. So a 60-year old man running 15:50 would be running and equivalent performance to the open world record. Now we divide the Age World Record of 15:50(950 seconds) by the actual time of 20:00 (1200 seconds) and we get .7917 or 79.17%. This is the Age Graded Percentage for a 20:00 5K by a 60-year old. We can calculate the age graded percentage for a 42:00 10K by the same runner using a similar method. I won't go through all the calculations here, but the Age Graded Percentage for this performance would be 77.98%. So the 20:00 5K is superior to the 42:00 10K for a 60-year old male. USATF/CT is calculating the Age Graded Percentage for every USATF member in every grand prix race. You must have been a member at the time of the race to count. For the Age Graded Standings, we are using the best six races for each runner and weighting them. So if your best performance has an Age Graded Percentage of 80% or .80, we multiply that by 6. If your second best performance is 78%, we multiply that by 5, and so on until we multiply your sixth best performance by 1. If you run less than six races, you can still place well but are at a disadvantage compared to those who ran more races. We counted performances at all 15 of the 1999 races, so masters performances at open races and open performances at masters races counted as well. For 2000, there are 11 grand prix races where you can be ranked. Note that we are NOT calculating performances at the Indoor Track Meet, largely due to the more time-consuming process of calculating all the different events. |