RunBritain rankings

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jda Dec 2019 7:31pm, 11 Dec 2019 5,953 posts	0 jda Maybe it also suggests you slightly misjudge how hard a course it was, ie you actually had a pretty good run! But certainly rbr doesn't always generate the result I had expected.
J2R Dec 2019 7:39pm, 11 Dec 2019 2,436 posts	0 J2R OK, but Telford is a long way from Suffolk, where I was. I can't imagine it would have pulled that many of the local runners away. jda, that's a possibility. I've changed my running training a bit recently and have had a handful of runs which, while not actually faster than usual, have felt relatively easy for the same times. I would still say, though, that if I wanted to focus on my RunBritain handicap, I could game things so that I would get a boost, by targeting particular parkruns. I could make it even better if I targeted parkruns the day before big races, but I seem to enter all the big local races anyway, so can't really do this!
Auld Lang Sigh Dec 2019 8:21pm, 11 Dec 2019 5,092 posts	0 Auld Lang Sigh 1,123 finishers at Telford; first sixteen (all Male U40) were all under 30 mins, and included runners from Swansea, Stockport, Southampton, Aldershot; the winner was from Inverclyde.
SPR Dec 2019 8:53pm, 11 Dec 2019 29,790 posts	0 SPR ...and it's the the site of the inter-area match that the Midlands host. It certainly attracts top runners from around the country.
jda Dec 2019 9:04pm, 11 Dec 2019 5,954 posts	0 jda J2R, the other thing is that if you tend to do short races, and not all that frequently, then older events will have a time penalty added to their score and a recent race may outscore them on that basis, even if not quite as strong a performance.
SPR Dec 2019 9:27pm, 11 Dec 2019 29,791 posts	0 SPR ...like the XC I mentioned earlier this week.
larkim Dec 2019 9:29am, 12 Dec 2019 9,745 posts	0 larkim I think J2R's recent parkrun ranked as one of his top races, even excluding the time penalty adjustment, if my RBR stalking is correct. But it's certainly true that if you have a solid race on a tough course but don't realise it you might get a big RBR boost that is properly earned. Having said that, I'm convinced that parkruns offer better opportunities to boost RBR rankings simply because more people don't give 100% in the same way that they do for paid races, and it only takes a handful of decent runners going at 95% to make the one guy running at closer to 100% get a big boost from the SSS adjustment.
Badger Dec 2019 10:03am, 12 Dec 2019 11,714 posts	0 Badger I think that's true. My 5 counting races are all parkruns at the moment, and to be fair most of my best WAVA grades are parkruns done at 100%, 5k is just my best distance at the moment (not my focus, just how things are), but on that basis there's a 10k that ought to be in there. And I do quite often parkrun at 10k or half pace when I have one of those coming up, so I'm not helping the stats myself.
SPR Dec 2019 10:56am, 12 Dec 2019 29,793 posts	0 SPR By nature of how the system works parkruns are likely to skew the rankings a bit given people don't always race them. Not much can be done about it though unless you want to exclude them. They aren't used for anything important so it's not a big deal.
larkim Dec 2019 11:18am, 12 Dec 2019 9,746 posts	0 larkim I suppose what would be interesting on RBR would be for 2 handicaps to be shown - one an "absolute" - i.e. simply how fast you ran that day over a distance with an algorithm established to give difference race lengths an equivalence, with a final adjustment made simply for how current that time is. Effectively the "basic" score with the TP adjustment, and none of the SSS vaguaries. The SSS adjustment is a good idea in practice, but over-influences the overall score. My top three scoring runs are a parkrun in 19:27 (basic score 8.6, net score 3.4), 10k in 37:58 (basic score 6.0, net score 3.9) and a 10m race in 64:24 (basic score 7.0, net score 4.0). The basic score for all of those feels about right as a comparison, but there's no way on earth that the parkrun was the harder of the three and deserves the massive discount for SSS. The time adjustments for all of them are within 0.1 of each other. If I download all of my RBR &debug=y scores and just rank performances based on basic + TP adjustment my top three would be the 10k, the 10m and a half from earlier in the year, with two parkruns then thrown in benefitting from being OK times but relatively recent. That feels about right to me. XC would of course then never get included, so the RBR system would lose some comparability overall. The alternative would be to apply some weighting to the "quality" of different categories of races, and downplay the parkruns somehow so that they don't skew the results too much.