I thought I’d do a short piece about something that a few of us are a little obsessive on and some are completely oblivious to, which are the above two websites.

These two websites are linked together and act as a database for athletics performances for just about any UK based athlete.

Power of 10 was set-up around ten years ago to collate and record performances across all disciplines and act as a permanent record thereof. You can look up anyone you want from Mo Farah to your next door neighbour.

Every individual registered to a UKA club can have their own page with all of their performances in track, field, road and cross-country recorded and listed. Additionally, there is a summary section at the top of each person’s page showing PB’s over every distance and every year. You can personalise your page with a photo should you wish and even give yourself a profile.

The other thing you can do is add historical performances once you are logged in. As long as there is some evidence that you have run the time you claim you can go back as far as you want. the founder Tim Grose has records going back to 1978.

Run Britain Rankings shares the same data as Power of 10 but is specifically focused on road running and cross-country and only goes back to 2010.

The main difference about this site is that it gives you a handicap which works in the same way a golf handicap does with a lower score being better. This has the potential to be an excellent personal target for anyone looking to improve.

A good example is Sam Dear who had a respectable handicap of 16.8 in May 2013 but after a couple of years in the club is now up to 2.9 and still climbing:

Your handicap is based on your “best” five performances in the last 12 months. Those performances are not simply taken on time though; they take into account the difficulty of the course, weather conditions and other things that affect all the runners so you can run a 25 minute parkrun one week and a 27 minute parkrun the next but the slower one may be ranked as a better performance. If you really want to know the detail there is more on the website, but do remember that only events licensed by UKA count.

As with Power of 10, you can submit any performances back to 2010 but once you are registered on the site it is very good at picking up your performances automatically. One thing you can do to help is register your parkrun barcode number as it pulls in all of your parkrun results too.

Additionally, the site gives lots of other rankings too, so for example Richard is currently the 143^rd ranked V70 in the country but is the best V70 in his postcode!

So if you like a stat and a bit of a target, get yourself registered and start working on your handicap.