Discussion: Still figuring out this web site ... question about "racing"

Hey there. I've been using this web site since late summer to log my workouts, and now I'm starting to explore it more.

Can anyone tell me how the "Racing" information works? Specifically, can any club post any of its events, or do events need to meet some official standard(s)?

Also, once a race is run, who posts the information about times? The runners themselves on an honor system, or the organizers of the races?

Last, do results of all races posted get counted in rankings at this site, or just certain races?

Thanks!

It's up to us attackpoint users (like yourself) to post the races and to post the results. Only you can post your results.

Your own ranking will be impacted by races which include at least four attackpoint users. You will not have a ranking value until you have run in two such races in the past twelve months.

You can also enter results for training runs if you want to use the split analysis. In this case, you enter the event type as "training" and it doesn't get counted. Also, if you add in multiple runs on the same course, only the first one counts.

have another question. for some race (colorado 5days for example) it seems that splits from all runners all online, even if they are not on attackpoint. is it possible to load up splits for other runners too ? or just my own, and then reruns ?

Those splits were entered courtesy of Ken who received the results files from the SI/results crew for the event. For some large US events all splits are loaded. Otherwise, each individual user has to post his/her own splits for a race. I have seen where some people have posted re-runs (though I have never done it and am not sure how to).

To post a re-run, re-visit the results for your desired event and the software will painlessly walk you through the process.

On a similar note, I've noticed that there is a list of "running" performances. How do you get something posted in this list?

There may be additional wrinkles I don't know about but I believe the factors essential to having a run show up in the list of running performances is that you categorise the run as a race rather than training when you enter it in your log and that the climb not exceed a certain fraction, I believe 1.5%, of the total distance run since that would invalidate the VDot calculation.

I have 2 more newbie questions about the split analysis:

1) How are "top_spd", "slow" and "lost" calculated? I've tried a couple different theories, but can't figure it out.

2) There's a request in the development section about entering splits for courses where you mispunched. In the meantime, if I manually enter my splits with a dummy time for the mispunch, copy down my estimated misses for legs I ran correctly, then delete my run, is that going to mess up the calculations for the other runners?

this is complicated and subject to tweaking so I won't explain completely, partly because I don't remember. but basically:

"leg score" (a.k.a. performance index) is your speed on a particular leg relative to the fastest splits, where 100 is the average speed of the top n, and n depends on how many results there are. leg scores are displayed on the splits analysis (sa) page.

"cruising speed" (spd) is an average of your highest leg scores, presumably ones you didn't mess up. think of this as how fast you were on your best half of the course (relative only to others on that course).

"time lost" applies when you have a split at least x% slower than a time predicted by your cruising speed, and is the difference between your actual time and your predicted time. this is computed slightly differently on the race-splits page and the split analysis (SA) page, only because I haven't updated SA yet.

it should be obvious that these values are not particularly useful for non-orienteering races.

as far as #2, go for it.

Thanks, Ken. That helps explain it. #2 seemed to work okay.