Friday, September 28, 2007

Understanding HARRA Standings

To all fellow BCRR Members:

We encourage you to participate in the HARRA Series. We talk about competition with other clubs and I know many of our member runners do not consider themselves a competitive runner and believe their participation would not make a big difference. Well, if you believe that, you would be WRONG.

Let me explain. There are two categories of competition: the TEAM and the CLUB. I will concentration on the club category and show you how your participation can help the club win the overall competition.

Here is how this works. There is a HARRA racing series each fall and spring. The current races are http://www.harra.org/955dir/Competitions/series.html

In each race, all club members times are tabulated. For master and veteran runners the times are age graded. The list of all club runner's times are sorted by gender, time and division (open, masters, and veterans). For each male category, the times are lumped into groups of four-- that is, the four fastest in a division, then the next four, and so on. The four times are totaled and compared to other group for four from other clubs. Each group of four is then ranked from fastest to slowest. For all women's divisions, teams are composed of groups of three instead of four.

In each division, the first seven teams will be awarded 13, 10, 8, 6, 5, 4, or 3 points sequentially. But here is the good part: all remaining teams in the division- no matter how slow or how many- will receive 2 points. So think about it. If we get six extra veteran women runners to participate in all six fall series races, BCRR scores an additional 24 points in the veteran women's division. There have been years when we have lostin a category by a lot less than 24 points.


THE MAIN POINT HERE IS THE KEY IS PARTICIPATION!

I hope to see a big group of BCRR Runners at the United Space Alliance 10 Mile Run on October 14, 2007
http://www.ontheruntx.com/10M.htm

1 comment:

  1. Thanks for the explaination Bob. I have to plea guilty when it comes to not totally understanding HARRA Club and Team competition scoring but I do know that participation is key! I think Houston is unique in that we have many different running clubs and we have an "umbrella" group that affords us this type of friendly competition between the clubs. It would be almost foolish not to take advantage of the unique opportunity we have here. Whenever we travel to other races and explain to runners across the country about HARRA, invariably they all wish they had something like this back home. We should definitely run the races if at all possible!

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