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Reply to "Effect of elevation on performance"

John Sissala used to include a "slope" or difficulty rating to every race in the Montgomery County Road Runners Club annual race schedule. He rated courses from 1 to 10, with 10 the hilliest. This was John's intuitive rating, based on his experience both measuring and running these courses. I always agreed with his ratings, and I remember that no one ever questioned them. I always felt this was a good help in setting my expectations about how to run new courses.

Bob (Thurston) - with all your experience, I am willing to bet your intuition would serve well for any course you have run or measured that you remember well. If you start of with a couple of benchmarks that are easy for everyone to agree on, I can guess you would come up with a highly reliable system that requires little or no number crunching.

For example, a track race = 1, and Pike's Peek Marathon = 10. Then, estimate what a 5 and a 6 might be from known courses. Interpolate in both directions and start to fill in courses in all ratings. Use .5s if you have to. Then, compare net altitude changes by looking at Google Earth maps of a few courses (I realize this is where some work comes in). Use these elevation profiles as a check and adjust your benchmark courses at all 10 levels. My thinking is that it then becomes relatively easy to evaluate the difficulty of all subsequent courses by using these benchmarks.

This is where I think intuition can serve better than math unless the math is highly sophisticated, and unless you are willing to do GE elevation profile for every single course being rated. Consider the example of a 10K with only 5 hills, but 3 of them are somewhat steep but not long, one is long but not too steep, and one hill is massive - long and steep. Now, compare this course with a 10K that has a few dozen ups and downs that are neither steep nor long. Both courses measure nearly the same net elevation change, yet the one with fewer but steeper, longer hills would be expected to produce slower times on the average, right? I think your educated guesswork might be all you need to produce a good rating system.
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