Nerd Alert..................

Run Britain rankings. Not my favourite picture.

For anyone who wants to have a bit of a laugh, I thought I'd post some statistics about my running over the past year. I admit you have to be a bit of a saddo to be interested in stats like these and even more of a saddo to want to keep them up to date. If you like running stats, and I don't know why you would, you'll probably be gripped; if not, you'll have probably have stopped reading this blog already. Whatever, this sort of stuff is right up my street!

So what stats are they? Well, for my own personal running I keep up to date with the Runtastic running app, and use this to monitor my distances, times, pace and speed for each run. You can also get lots of other statistics, for example, this are my overall stats since I've been using Runtastic:

So this year, I've run over 600 miles, and over 1000 since this time last year...... which surprised me a little. You can also look at other stats, including a load around total distances per month, duration, calories burnt etc. All pretty riveting stuff.

Average duration of runs - Runtastic

However, my thirst for nerdism has been satisfied the most by the Run Britain website, which looks at the the times of runners at official races and compares them with other runners. The site then provides you with your own ranking out of runners in Britain, together with your very own "official" handicap. All very exciting. When I started looking at this last year, I had a handicap

Run Britain handicap progress

rating of something like 22.5 and over the year I've improved to reach the heady heights of a handicap of 15.8 (though I've dropped back from 15.6 as I've not raced recently!). The site gives greater weighting to more recent performances and also takes account of the difficulty of both the course and the conditions on the day. So a slower run on a more difficult course might give you a higher score than a quicker run on an easier track.

So, according to Run Britain, this is where I rank amongst all the runners in Britain: I'm 82,310th overall, the 65,134th best male runner and for men in my age category, I come a creditabe 5604th. I don't really know what this means, apart from (as my handicap would suggest) I'm a pretty average runner. I would acknowledge that being the 5th best male runner for my age group in my area does not particularly strike me as being something to write home about. 

However, there is something mildly addictive about stats and I have been encouraged to see my handicap drop over the last few months. I've also found the information from Runtastic to be really interesting and has spurred me on to try to improve at times. But there again, I'm sad.