Ver 1.0

This is the first official release of the results site and is now finally (more or less) in French. There are only a few visual changes from 0.6 as well as a couple of bug fixes.

Ver 0.6 is here.

The main change in ver 0.6 is a rewritten prediction page that perhaps should really be called form guide. Instead of listing a single set of times for each distance, 5 metrics are now included. Most are self explanatory, but the “Adjusted Form” metric requires a bit of explanation. As with the standard Form metric, recent races are analyzed to produce a set of equivalent times for each distance. Before including a result in the final calculation, it is compared with an athlete’s average equivalent performance over the past 12 months. If it differs positively by more than 5% it is rejected from the final analysis. This will hopefully eliminate races which were particularly difficult, e.g. due to a large hill, or where the athlete was running at less than maximum capacity, resulting in a more accurate analysis.

Which metric is the most accurate? As ever there is not a simple answer as performance on the day can depend on many external factors that cannot be incorporated into the prediction algorithm. It’s probably best to consider the metrics together, remembering that the results will be more accurate if the athlete has raced frequently in the preceding months.

Other new features include a VMA calculator. Enter your reference time over 1500m or 2000m and the calculator will generated interval times over various distances for VMA training sessions. There are also a few bug fixes and some new help menus that make use of some Ajax collapsible panels. They are somewhat basic at the moment but should get better with time.

One feature that didn’t make the cut was another prediction metric base on performance trend over recent races. The idea is to use Linear Regression over past results to produce a trend of whether an athlete’s form is improving or not. In theory it should then be possible to predict a range of expected times for an athlete’s next race based on confidence intervals on the previously produced line. Not surprisingly, results can sometimes be fairly wild as the majority of athletes do not produce enough reference data to allow for a precise analysis. I will probably end up restricting this future metric to athletes who have raced at least 4 times in the past 6 months.