Rtype wrote:
Nice quality runs lucKY. Maybe the crazy schedule somehow provides benefits due to its eccentricity?
Thanks, Rtype...certainly a down week momentarily puts more pep in the stride. I'm still never quite sure of the optimal prescription for the run-to-recovery ratio. Feels like a moving target.
Back to the age-grade standards. I'll just put this up there and see what people think. I took the WMA2010 road age-grade tables (
http://www.world-masters-athletics.org/laws-a-rules/appendixes-and-tables/195-wma-2010-combined-events-age-grading-tables) and made some ratios. I think these look goofy.
For the first analysis, I compared women's to men's age-grading benchmark times (in seconds) as a function of age for several distances.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B1XVuQqQBlcwdE9CTXY2ZFRjNGc&authuser=0I thought it was very odd how there weird squiggle for all the distances up to half-marathon. A slight squiggle at 30K, but no obvious squiggle for the marathon.
I thought I'd try to see where that squiggle was coming from, so I figured I'd compare the ratio of age-grade factors to the 5k age-grade factor for each age (for example, at age 60, the men's 5k age-grade factor is 0.8043, while their HM age-grade factor is 0.8090 for a ratio of 1.0058):
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B1XVuQqQBlcwYUwxUjRjSm01M00&authuser=0https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B1XVuQqQBlcwcElfQUVSV2lORkU&authuser=0For Men, the ratio of age-grade factors to 5k factors were all unity up to 10k, then they start deviating. For Women, the ratio stays unity all the way through HM, then there's deviations. So here's the odd disparity. For longer distances, the men's long-distance/5k factors get dramatically better as one approaches 40 (because the 5k factors start declining at 32, while the marathon doesn't kick in until 36), then they catch back up with the 5k factors around age 60, then *oddly reverse course* and start improving again (Ed Whitlock effect?). Meanwhile the women's stay flat up to HM, but immediately start getting worse for the longer distances from age 35 (all distances have declining age-grade factors starting around age 31 for women) with a leveling off for a while, then a sharp *decline* in the 70's. The opposite trend as for the men.
So, like I said, seems goofy to me. And I realize that the tables are historical-performance-based, but clearly some averaging/smoothing takes place, since they use the same factors across many distances and ages. Anybody want to take a crack at deciphering this?
Also, most the men's single-age world records for ages 18-39 have been set in the past 4 years, so I think that the age-grade factors for men's 40-yo and up will likely come down a bit with the next compilation.