View Past Races to Compete Against People in Your Age Group
Comparing yourself to others can be dangerous, but it is also motivating if you choose comparisons carefully. I continue to see people, especially beginners, complaining that they are “slow” or wondering how far apart they are from the “average” runner.
The truth is, “average” means nothing in the world at large. There are tons of people who never run. You are faster than them! Meanwhile, the world records for 5 km are 12:37 for men (Kenenisa Bekele) and 14:11 for women (Tirunesh Dibaba).
So where do you place yourself if the chances are that you will spend your entire athletic life somewhere between the two extremes? I have a little thought experiment that I enjoy doing, and I find it motivating:
- Find a local race that takes place every year that describes itself as “smooth and fast track”.
- Check out last year’s results.
- Take time and ratings for everyone in your age group (this could be something like “women 30-39”).
From here, you can print the list or paste it into a spreadsheet. You know your best 5K time; now you know the best 5K times on a particular day of people who actually took part in this race in your city.
Now you can see how you are comparing. Maybe there are 20 people in your age group, and if you ran your best time that day, you would be in 15th place.
This is not a judgment about how good a runner you are on some cosmic scale. But it does give you an idea of what you might expect if you competed in this race next year. And I recommend that you work out that next year’s race, the permitting pandemic. How much can you improve by then?
Insert this into your workout diary and treat it as a virtual leaderboard. Who was # 14? How much time would you have to save to defeat them? And how long will it take for you to break into the top 10?
If you are truly committed to this thought experiment – and this is what I have done in the past – get out and walk right down the track. There is usually a map on the racing site. You may find that hills or other conditions make the task a little more difficult, so now you have time for a more accurate comparison. The weather can change as well, as can your luck with who happened to be on the starting line that day, so look back a few years if you want a really reliable dataset to compare.
In time, return to the same stretch of road and start it as a race against the clock, pretending to be race day. Your time will improve whether there is an official race or not. And when racing day comes again next year, you can see how you feel on the real leaderboard.