We are interested in the differences between recreational, semi-elite and elite athletes. We stratify athletes based on age-graded performance criteria. This commonly used grading system takes a time for a distance and uses the world record time for your sex and age to produce a score (a percentage). For the purpose of this study we classify caterories as shown in Table 1.

We use the calculator available HERE .

Example times for men and women age 18-45 in our study are given in Table 2 and Table 3. We used an age of 30 to determine threshold of times of above 79% as semi-elite or above 89% as elite in our categories. As we ask for either 5000m or 5k time from participants we use the 5k thresholds as category determinants. The same goes for 1000m and 10k time. Participants only need one time to fall within the elite category to be classed as elite.

Table 1: Age graded classifications

Table 2: Age-graded performance criteria for men using 90% (elite) and 80% (semi-elite) of world class performance.

Table 3: Age-graded performance criteria for women using 90% (elite) and 80% (semi-elite) of world class performance.