And the #clickyourclock Polar OH1 winner is...Justin Burden!
We are pleased to announce the winner of this week's bank holiday #clickyourclock competition as Justin Burden (running handicap 11.9) from Ashford Striders in Kent. After several events in recent months, his running handicap has improved and he won the prize draw from all of the handicap improvers in the #clickyourclock competition.
Throughout 2019 we are rewarding runners who have improved their handicap score with a Polar OH1 Heart Rate Sensor.
The competition runs during the spring and summer months. Each week a random draw is made from all runners on the #clickyourclock leaderboard whose scores have improved by any amount in the preceding seven days and the prize is a Polar OH1 Heart Rate Sensor.
This week, there were 1084 clocks clicked and, out of those, 523 showed an improvement and went into the draw.
Justin Burden (handicap 11.9) ran in the Ashford parkrun His 23:23 performance was not his best but contributed towards his improvement.
Interestingly, his time was one second slower than the previous week but the conditions suggest it was a much better performance than the 23:22 he ran when comparing his vSSS score of -0.5 against -2.4 last weekend. (The lower the score, the better you ran in comparison to others). Further proof of this is the difficulty of the course (SSS score) on the two weekends that had 2.4 and 4.4 respectively. 4.4 indicates that the conditions were more challenging. See below for further clarification.
He started racing on the road in 2010 and has run regularly in the last few months with four events in August. With many events under his belt and good consistency, it was enough for him to improve his handicap score by 0.479. He has been randomly picked this week and will soon be receiving his prize.
The handicap scoring system rewards regular racing as well as improved performances. Justin is a regular park runner and is a worthy winner. Well done!
Don't forget there are many racing days available this week as evening events are still abundant, so now claim your handicap and be ready to #clickyourclock after your race this weekend.
How is the SSS (Standard Scratch Score) worked out?
The SSS is a difficulty score based on how easy or difficult it was to run a quick time in a given race. The harder it was to run a quick time, the higher the SSS score. The way it is worked out is by looking at people's times in a particular race and comparing it against their previous performances. As a very simplified example, if 100 people run in race A one weekend, and the same 100 run in race B over the same distance the next weekend, if, on average, the field is 60 seconds slower in race B than race A, there was clearly some factor (be it weather conditions, accuracy of course measurement, type of terrain, competitiveness of the field, how hilly the course was etc) which caused times to be slower. Therefore the SSS for race B will be higher than the SSS for race A.
Sometimes the system doesn’t have enough data to run the calculations properly – for example if there were only a small number taking part and only a few of them have profiles so we have limited access to previous performance data. In this situation the system gives a notional value of 1.0.
I have run some faster times in recent races but there are not included in my handicap counters. Why is this?
The vSSS (versus Standard Scratch Score) gives a score for how people did in comparison to the rest of the field in that race on that day, the lower (more negative) this is - the better the performance. It is possible to run a slightly quicker time but on an easier day or course and have a slightly worse vSSS. So when considering handicap counting performances – these are the ones with a + next to them – vSSS scores also need to be viewed.