Does it hurt/help your score/placing to record a slow time for a course you have run multiple times? Where/how does average pace factor in? Just curious!
Good question, @SarahG, and the short answer is that the scoring is carefully calibrated so that you’re never penalized for running a course slowly, as you might want to do if you’re running with a friend who’s slower—we never want to get in the way of such runs.
The key is the per-course best average, for which the leaderboard looks only at each runner’s top efforts beyond the average number of runs for that course. From the rules:
Per-Course Best Average Time Competition: This competition has two caveats:
- To compete at all, runners must complete at least the average number of efforts that someone has completed the course. Otherwise, the fastest runner could run the course only once and have the fastest time as the best average time, which isn’t fair. For instance, imagine a course where 4 people have run three times, 5 people have run twice, and 6 people have run once. That’s 28 total runs divided by 15 runners, making the average number of runs 1.9. Thus only people who have completed at least 2 efforts can compete.
- A runner’s “best average time” is calculated using the course-run-average number of their top efforts. In the example above, since the average number of efforts for the course is 1.9, only the top 2 efforts for each runner will be used to calculate the best average time. This rule ensures that there’s no penalty for running slowly on a course—a slow effort beyond the average number of efforts will not bring down a runner’s average time.