The ages of woman

I mentioned the Strathaven Striders new "Run with the Wind" 10K in my last post. This was an excellently organised affair and a great addition to the running calendar.

One thing rather took the shine off of the event though, and that was some rather muddled thinking by the organisers about the womens age groupings. Ever since the SAF dropped the male vet age to 35 for championship events, one has never really known what to expect at club level. We're all used to the old age divisions, whatever their faults. I can see the logic behind dropping the age for male vets if that really does correspond to the level at which men cease being able to compete with their juniors but it's a bit irksome if you're 51 say, to find that at some events, you're no longer a junior supervet but you're more than halfway through your term!

Anyway, that's not what happened in Strathaven (just a general grumble at messing with accepted standards). On Sunday, the female vets were lumped into a 15 year age group (35-49) rather than the usual 10 year group (35-44). I've queried this with the organisers but they haven't really cleared up whether this was a mistake or a deliberate choice.

Having produced more than a few dodgy results myself over the years, I can easily understand that it could have been a mistake but if it was deliberate, it seems more than a bit unfair to female athletes who may find themselves as vets competing against runners up to 15 years their junior. You could just about justify it if you were to impose the same age grouping to the men but that wasn't the case, male vets were the usual 40-49 age group.

Of course I probably wouldn't have paid any attention to this if it hadn't been for the fact that one of our club runners almost certainly lost out on a first lady supervet prize because of it. It's probably too late to do anything about it now but hopefully next year they'll use a more conventional age grouping.

I think I'm getting fuddier and duddier by the minute. ;-)