Age, altitude, and frantic mental masturbation

Now that I'm undeniably back in the racing game after a decade away, during which time I became old and moved to Boulder, I have the option, or the obligation, to mess around with mathematical tools that allow me to estimate how fast I might be running on sea-level courses comparable to the ones I tackle here, and to gauge how my efforts stack up against younger versions of myself.

The only data point I have so far is last Monday's Bolder Boulder 10K. I ran it in 38:31.

The site Trackbound USA (which, curiously enough, has a .uk domain name) has a nifty downloadable altitude conversion tool that allows you to plug in times at various distances at various elevations above sea level and determine similar performances at other altitudes. Obviously I'm not interested in how much slower I'd be at elevations higher than the ones I'm living, training and racing in, so I plugged in the mean elevation of the Bolder Boulder course (about 5,350') and my 38:31 so see what this would yield on a sea-level course with a comparable topographic profile. The result: 37:09.

OK, that's half the fun. If I take that result and plug it into the World Masters Athletics road age-grading calculator, I find that a 37:09 is supposedly worth a 33:52 for someone 35 or younger. (Interestingly, if you perform these steps in the opposite order, the end result is the same.)

I'm skeptical of this. For one thing, I know I didn't give my best effort on Monday and I've already thrown the plausible enough reasons for this onto this blog. For another, the Bolder Boulder course is slow -- at paces like mine, as much as maybe 45 seconds compared to an idealized road course and certainly compared to a track. This means that had I been about dozen years younger (most of my PRs were set in a fairly short period in 2004, when I was 34) and racing on a track in Boston in good weather like we had Monday, and put forth the same level of effort I did on Memorial Day after six months of nothing followed by six months of steady 65- to 70-mile weeks, I could have run 5:20 pace for 10 kilometers. Assuming this mumbo-jumbo is on target. And I think I would have been slower than that.

So, I'm skeptical. The altitude conversion is fairly straightforward and includes a wealth of data points, but WMA age-grading only takes into account three values: The overall WR, the WR for your age, and your time. That is, it divides the open WR by the WR for your age, then multiplies the result by your own performance. Thus all it takes is one otherworldy performance by someone like 42-year-old Bernard Lagat, who just ran 28:13 in a 10K in England, to ruin things for every 42-year-old runner in the world, because it lowers the gap between the open WR and the WR for 42-year-olds and changes to multiplication factor to a higher decimal number, thereby carving less theoretical time from your own performance.

I'm sure I can get my "converted" 10K time under 30 minutes by the end of the year, as long as there's some online tool that tells you how fast your high-altitude time would be if your 47-year-old body were thrown out of an airplane 10 kilometers off the ground.