Handicaps and Training Scores

We compute handicaps by looking at your race history and use them for our training leaderboard and handicap races.

We store handicaps as WAVA age graded percentages. For a race your age graded percentage is determined by the ratio between your time for the race and the world record time for the race within your age and sex category. A WAVA rating of 90% indicates someone who can just about compete at an international level for their age category, an 80% WAVA rating indicates somone who can just about qualify for national level events.

We compute your handicap as follows:

For every race over the last two years, we look at your age graded percentage. We can only calculate this for certain event distances, but we look at every race where we can calculate it.
We then take off a further percentage according to how long it is since you achieved this result. If it was a year ago, we would take off one percent. The idea is that if you have been ill or injured you still have a decent chance.

From your handicap it is possible to work out what 5K time you would need to run to achieve that age graded percentage. That then gives your handicap as a 5K equivalent time.

When we've held handicap races we've used a route around Highgate Woods of slightly more than 5K. Your handicap as a "Highgate Woods" time determines how much of a head start you will get in the race.

In our training leaderboard and on our training data page you will see there is a score for each run you do. This is computed by comparing an equivalent 5K time to your training run using our pace calculator and then comparing this to the 5K time predicted by your handicap. A score of 100% would mean that you have been training at exactly your race pace for the total distance of the session. If you are running an interval training session, its very common to get scores of more than 100% because of the rests.