Bill Hunter reports:
I am often asked how did I arrive at the handicap for a runner? When compared with someone else.
The workings of the handicapper are pretty straightforward and rely sometimes on the honesty of runners I have no history for. Take the Novice cup for instance. Times are used from the scratch race and Novice cup the previous year plus the scratch race run before the Novice cup.
All the times are correlated and the FASTEST time from those 3 races is used as the handicappers expected time the runner should do for the race.
Unfortunately we don’t always get it right, but generally it is a tried and true method of getting a time that the runner should be able to run.
New runners with no history are a problem, so after asking a few questions regarding what they have done or how long to run 5k, I slot them in a space that I feel is about their ability.
No account is taken for runners who say that they are injured or haven’t trained much. The time given on the handicap sheet is the time they will start.