Some thoughts about AGE-SEX GRADED results

Once upon a time, racing was pretty simple: the first runner across the finish line was the winner, the second was the runner up, the third got the bronze medal, the fourth ...

Then someone observed "Hey, she was the first woman" or "Did you see how fast that first 40 year old was?" or whatever subgroup the observer had in mind, and those feats seemed worthy of recognition, so age groups by sex, or age-sex groupings, were born. First, the race was divided just by "open" and "masters" for age, and "male" and "female" for sex, so the timers had 4 groups to track, which wasn't too onerous. Then perhaps someone decided to to it by 10 year age groups, so suddenly there might be 12 groups for the timers and scorers to worry about. Some races, mainly large but not always, started dividing the runners into 5 year age groups in each sex, so now the poor scorers might have 24 or more categories. This administrative nightmare also led to delayed results.

If we kept refining into smaller and smaller age groups, the logical end of this progression would be one year age groups. Which might mean 120+ categories; pretty silly, unless you can compare the different categories. The national record keeping bodies, like USAT&F, do, in fact, keep track of the record time for each recognized distance, age, and sex, so one can look up, for example, the fastest time for 20 km by a 49 year old male, or for a marathon by a 72 year old female, or for 400 m by a 6 year old boy, or whatever.

Where does the comparison come from? Of all the recorded times for the 20 km, one will be the fastest. It happens to be for M25 [male aged 25]. The fastest time by someone in the race director's class on race day 2000, M55, happens to be 11:54 slower [M55 - M25 = 11min 54sec]. So if the race director actually ran in the Lake Monona 20 km Run and finished in, say, 90 minutes flat, the Actual Time = 90:00, the Adjustment = 11:54, and the Net Time = 90:00 - 11:54 = 78:06 = 1:18:06. So we do this for every finisher, to get Net Times, and then reorder the order of finish by Net Time.

And we're back to having a [net time] first runner, second runner, etc, nice and simple, with everyone's age and sex taken into account. No more need for age groups by sex, which were always unfair to the oldest members of an age group, anyway. Yes, I know, this removes one of the runner's pleasures at getting older: "Hey, I'm in a new age group". Only now that happens every year, and the scoring is fairer.

Now that you've read this far, here are some changes. The adjustments made with chip timing use the WAVA tables. You can try it out here . The WAVA tables are based on ratios, not difference, and are intended to remove the problems that arise from the observation that people get faster in years where their ages divide evenly by five. You can read a discussion here .



There will be twenty five awards, one to each of the first 25 Net Time finishers.

If you would like to share your thought, feedback should go to Race Director

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revised 2005.04.07