Pappy wrote:
ric flair woo wrote:
So Tully Runners has Josh Methner's 14:11 at detweiler this year as a 188 speed rating. They rated Liam Anderson's NXN win as a 201. And if each point is worth 3 seconds, they are basically predicting that Liam Anderson could run a 13:32 on detweiler, which would beat Craig Virgins record by 18 seconds. Am I understanding how speed ratings work correctly?
I'd have to say the speed ratings are off and/or the conversion. I'd be surprised if Liam were able to run under 14:00 at Detweiller. Illinois has had a lot of kids do well at these national meets and none of them could beat Virgin's time. Predicting 18 second faster than multiple Olympians from Illinois is pretty bold.
The confusing concept involving speed ratings is that speed ratings are relative numbers while race times , such as course records, are absolute numbers ... they can not be compared directly.
The primary speed rating concept is - How fast you ran is determined by how fast everybody else ran ... so it is a relative comparison to other runners.
Since viewers are wondering about Craig Virgin's course record of 13:50.6, I thought speed rating that race might be of interest to some people and give some insights to speed rating guessing that is not necessary during a regular season.
The best I could do for a quick evaluation was finding the top 70 race times from the 1972 Illinois State Meet where Virgin ran 13:50.6 ... In 1972, Illinois States had a single race (it was not divided into classes) ... so for comparison to recent years of the Illinois State Meet, I had to merge the top times from the classes.
I have my known race adjustments for recent years of the meet, so to determine Craig Virgin's speed rating in 1972 is a process of determining the difference in inherent speed of the 1972 race versus recent Illinois State Meet races.
This requires a major assumption or a "Meylan guess" ... My assumption is this - the general quality of the top 70 guys in 1972 is similar to the quality in recent years ... and looking at graphs of the races, Craig Virgin was much faster than everybody else and is considered an outlier data point.
The very top guys in recent years of the Illinois State Meet (especially in 2018) have not raced that fast in comparison to other groups of runners in the race, so their speed ratings have been somewhat low for whatever reason, but 2016 was a decent race for comparison to 1972 ... However, plots of all recent races clearly show that the 1972 race ran noticeably slower than recent races.
Determining how much slower requires some more guessing ... But based on experience and accepting that some similarity in quality exists between the top 70 guys in 1972 and recent years, my current guess would be that Craig Virgin's speed rating in 1972 falls within the range of 199 to 203 ... that would also mean that 2nd-place in 1972 would range from 189 to 193 which seems to make sense.
Another thing to remember about a course like Detweiller Park ... Shorter fast courses typically yield slightly lower speed ratings at the top for exceptional performances ... Very common at at Van Cortlandt Park's 2.5 mile races ... the reason is shorter fast races can limit the amount distance runners put between themselves and other runners (and that can lower speed ratings) ... On a slower 5K course, it would not surprise me if Craig Virgin's State Meet performance would be in the mid to upper 200s.