From a reader named Kevin O’Toole comes a bleg that needs input from people with experience in the realms of running, races, and maybe Olympic competition. (We tussled with Olympic medal counts here; and Justin Wolfers harnessed your collective wisdom when he ran the Stockholm Marathon.) Here’s Kevin’s story:
For the past few years, I’ve had some ongoing bets with friends at work (a supply-chain management company in Atlanta) around weight loss and fitness — just to stay in shape and keep it interesting. We’ve refined things based on the concept we liked at StickK.com (haven’t been there in a while, but I heard about it on Freakonomics).
Last fall we had a bet around a 5K race, which my team lost. We want an opportunity to redeem ourselves, and being the engineering types we are (you should see our 5MB college-football pool spreadsheet), we’ve decided to complicate things a little and do four races with two teams of two.
The races will be run in the following order: 10K, 1 mile, 5K, and half-marathon (at least 12 weeks after the 5K). This is a good mix of speed and endurance, with spacing to minimize risk of injury and optimize training.
The challenge is this: we don’t think we should pick the winner based on total time. We want to reward the speed runners if they can win big at those races and reward the distance runners if they can put in time on the long races. If you just go by time, then 30 seconds in the mile or 1 minute in the 5K won’t count as much as 90 seconds in the half-marathon (or, conversely, the distance runner would have an advantage there).
Both teams are a mix of running experience: Andrew (five marathons and many 5K’s and 10K’s) paired with David (one 5K and one 10K), versus Kevin (a few 10K’s and 5K’s, and two half-marathons) and Eric (four marathons and many 5K and 10K races).
We want all four times to count toward the total for each race and for the overall, but straight-up time puts the emphasis too heavily on the 10K and half-marathon. What do people think would be a good handicap system? Some point system with a points-per-second factor based on race length? Some combination of total time with a factor based on the length of the race?
Please help Kevin as best as you can. Send you own future blegs here.
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Along the z score approach, somebody already has a great z score for running. Jack Daniels, world’s best running coach, not the whiskey, has a number that describes rate of oxygen consumption, VDOT. It’s a good objective measure of your race performance. He spent a lot of time assigning VDOTs for a whole bunch of races. You can take the times from the various races, google vdot calculator, enter your race times, get a vdot, average them and pick a winner.
Since you are engineers, I’d recommend a progressively curved point system along the lines of the one used for events scoring in the decathlon. Also see the rationale behind this system here.
The easiest thing to do is to multiply all race times together, to get a grand total product for each person. Lowest score wins. Shaving 1% off of any one race will reduce a player’s total score by 1%. Shaving 1% off of all four races is about as useful as shaving 3.94% (almost 4%) off of any one race.
An equivalent method (in the sense that it will always give the same winner) is to sum the logarithms of the different times. A 1% improvement on any given race will lower your score by about .01 (if you use a natural logarithm), or (.01/ln10=.004365) if you use the base 10 logarithm.
Percentile finish versus age-class.
That is, if you finish 25th versus 100 in your age-class, then are in the 75th percentile. Same thing if you finish 2nd in an age class of five racers. (The catch is that if you’re in a small category small changes make a big difference.)
Add up the finishes, top percentile wins.
Several above have suggested awarding points based on the winning margin as a fraction of the length of that race. This seems to have the most intuitive appeal but I doubt it would really work in practice. Runners get injured – they twist ankles, get cramps, and otherwise pull up lame in all manner of creative ways. One injury (seemingly likely in 16 person-races) could seriously distort such a system.
I would suggest a points system based on the ranking in each race (i.e. 3 points for placing first, 2 for second, 1 for third). You could alter these point values based on your preferences. For instance, if you want to encourage specialization, you could award more points to first place. If you deem some races more important than others, award more points for those. There are many possibilities but we’d have to know more about your goals.
The solution isn’t perfect. Like the other suggestions, it would allow for a blowout. Ideally, you want both teams to have a chance to win up to the last race.
Of course, you could just play basketball…
Use paces based on the MacMillan chart or something similar rather than absolute run times – that will let you equalize across the different races (i.e. that – I’m making up numbers, too lazy to pick real ones! – 8:10 pace in a 10K equals 8:32 pace in a half-marathon) and reward the winning teams for speed, but with conversions for different distances: i.e. it’s a tie if person X runs 8:10/mi. in the 10K and person Y runs 8:32/mi. in the half.
http://www.mcmillanrunning.com/Running%20University/Article%201/mcmillanrunningcalculator.htm
Calculate the speed of each runner during each race, in actual mph, to 3 decimals.
Add those together.
Perhaps throw it on a curve? If you are confident that no one’s going to tank to throw off the curve, the percentage difference between the winner and the last place finisher or between the winner and the field, multiplied by the log of the distance — to make each second of pace maintained over the longer distance worth more — should create a system that takes into account the distance delta and the talents of the collection of runners.