With a Marathon PB of 2hr 05’11”, how could Mo Farah run 2hrs 39’ 48” and it be regarded as an improvement ?
Age grading – that’s how!!!
All Sir Mo has to do to regard running a 2hrs 39’48” marathon as an improvement, is to achieve it when he’s 65 years old.
Unless you’ve only recently entered the sport as a veteran and are therefore still on the upward trend that results from exciting new training schedules and maybe a modest starting point, in absolute terms from around the age of forty(ish) you’re going to gradually get slower. If you retain the energy, enthusiasm and physical ability to keep training at an intense level you may slow the ageing clock down, but there’s no amount of training that can completely hold back the effects of time. Once you’ve come to terms with that fact, there’s great consolation to be found by consulting an age-grading calculator. Based on times compared against the world record, then set on a sliding scale to take age into account, they provide a %percentage figure which you can use to measure how well you are running year-on-year, against your peers, against the youngsters up at the front, but also as a direct comparison from your performances of years ago. For example; if at the age of 30 you could run 10 miles in 56’00”, you would still be running at the same standard – age graded – if by the age of 60 you were able to run it in 68’40”. This helps to show that when the sloping playing field is levelled up, you may not be doing quite as badly as you thought you were. If your “percentages” hold up reasonably well, then relatively speaking, you’re hanging on in there!!! However, you don’t have to be over the hill to get some use out of the grading tools. You can use it to gauge your performances relative to each other even if you’re still a spring chicken. You can also get a steer as to what you might achieve over other distances based on you grade percentage. As another example, a 30 year old running 5 miles in 35 minutes gets a 60.93 % grading. Assuming this to be your expected performance percentage level, the calculator shows that you would run 1hr 35’ 52” for a half marathon.
A quick online search will show you there are plenty of these grading tools available and they are generally fairly comparable, but be aware that they can give some slightly variable results if you are comparing the same result from site to site, so probably best to choose one that suits you and stick with it. Some are a bit more user-friendly than others, and for ease of use a site called www.rat.run/age-grading works pretty well. It’s laid out in such a way, that once you’ve submitted a time for any given distance, it calculates your percentage and then also shows what times you’d need to run to achieve the same level of performance over various different distances. Give it a go – it might put that competitive spring back into your step !!!
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