If you’re a runner, you might believe that you have to be a certain age to hit your running peak and clock your best times. Then, once you’ve passed that period, your performance will decline and, slowly but surely, you’ll fall behind the pack.
But this is not necessarily the case – age does not affect running achievement. No matter how old you are, you can maintain that competitive edge by using what's known as age grading, which measures the strength of your running performance while accounting for both your age and gender. With age grading, you can see how your current race times compare with those you attained in previous years, as well as with those of other runners – even if they are 20 years older or younger than you, for example.
Here’s what you need to know about age grading, along with a handy age-grading calculator to let you see how your running performances stack up.
Race time predictor and training pace calculator?
An age-grading calculator produces a score for a given race time. The score is expressed as a percentage of the world’s best time for your chosen race distance and for your specified age and gender. For example, as you’ll see when you use our age-grading calculator below, a 44-year-old woman who runs 5K in 25:00 will get an age-graded score of 62.33%.
How to use the Norwegian 4x4 workout:
- 100% = world record
- 90% = world class
- 80% = national class
- 70% = regional class
- 60% = local class
of the best hill training workouts for runners age-graded time for any race time that you enter. An age-graded time is the equivalent performance by a person of the same gender in the open division, which generally goes up to the age of 34. So, using the same example as before, the 44-year-old woman’s 5K performance of 25:00 equates to an age-graded time of 23:41.
The Runner’s World Editors?
Simply enter your age, sex, recent race time and corresponding race distance into the fields below. Then, the calculator will automatically display your age-graded score.
Why should I use an age-grading calculator?
We can’t keep setting PBs forever. If you’re no longer chipping away at your finish times, age grading shows how your current race times compare with those that you set in the past. For example, if you set your marathon PB at the age of 28 and recently ran another marathon at the age of 54, you can input the data for both races and see which one scores higher. You might discover that, although slower in absolute terms, your current times produce higher age-graded scores. In that sense, you really can get better with age.
You can also use the age-grading calculator to compare recent finish times at different race distances. That way, you can identify your strongest running event and the ones that you’d like to work on.
Additionally, with the age-grading calculator, you can compare your performances with those of other runners, regardless of their age, gender or running speed. If you recently finished a race, for instance, you could take a look at the results and input the age and gender of any runner who finished around you to see whose performance was best, from an age-grading perspective. You could even compare your age-graded score with that of the outright race winner, to see how close you were to them in these terms. Who knows? You may even get a little boost of confidence after doing so.
