The Club Grand Prix is back for 2022! Following a hiatus of a few years the Senior’s Grand Prix is back with a new scoring structure. The Grand Prix is designed to find the best runner, whilst encouraging participation and promoting our club. Oh, and of course having fun!
The last time we ran this was in 2018. 5 runners completed races in the 5 categories required. The winner was Ben Heathcote, with an amazing mean score of 77.61, closely followed by Ian Brown with 76.28. Winner of the opposite sex award is Lisa Tang with an excellent 75.22 followed by Kim Firstbrook and Jules Pearson with 72.82 and 64.97. Well done all!
Rules
The basic rules are as follows:
The scoring system uses the principal of WAVA percentages. In simple terms, if you run at half the speed that would get you a world record for that distance for your age and sex, then you get a score of 50%. For example the male world record for the marathon is just over 2 hours, so if you ran a marathon in just over 4 hours you get a score of 50%. Where things get cunning is that there are tables available for all major distances and ages. The equivalent to a world record for 60 year old male is a 2:30:15 marathon, so that same 4 hour marathon gets a score of 63%, compared to the 51% for a 24 year old. A 60 year old women gets 73% for a 4 hour marathon.
- Races are split into 3 categories; Fell/Trail, <=10k, >10k.
- The final score and ranking is the mean of your best 5 scores featuring at least 1 from each category.
- Where no world record is available, the course record will be used in lieu. Where no course record is available (or the course has changed) then the winners time will be used.
- The judges decision is final.
The 2018 races are as follows:
Up to 10k. The best WAVA scores from the following 6 races will count:
- Prudhoe or Tynegreen Parkrun, best time over the year.
- Clive Cookson 10k
- Newburn River Run
- Blaydon Race
- Morpeth 10k
- Hexham 10k
Endurance. The best WAVA score from the following 7 races will count
- Druridge Bay Half Marathon
- Hexham Half Marathon
- Hadrian’s Wall Half Marathon
- Coastal Run
- Great North Run
- Brampton to Carlisle 10 Mile
- Any Certified Marathon, trail is OK but no allowance for terrain
Trail/Fell. The best WAVA score from the following 5 races will count:
- Alnwick NEHL cross country
- George Ogle Memorial Race
- Anne Allan Memorial Race
- Thropton Show Fell Race
- Hexhamshire Hobble
Plus 2 extra scores from any of the above
The small print
Full rules are available to download, and there is also an introduction to the championships.
Following some number crunching, several arbitrary decisions were made about the model distances. This is because there is no world record for the trail and fell races on the calendar. Therefore the ‘closest record faster than’ is chosen. For example I used the 20km records for the Hexhamshire Hobble. The other exception is for the Blaydon Race; a pseudo world record was created by interpolating between the nearest world records available. This stands to reason as the Blaydon Race course is reasonably fast, in contrast with the Hobble…
Finally, I took peoples ages at the end of the year, not the age on the day of the race. The spreadsheet to allow the opposite was too complicated…
