Club Standards?

Surely they can’t be that high if they approved my membership application! Jokes aside, this has been a fun challenge (for me personally) and I look forward to it growing in the future.

The club standards is essentially just a big spreadsheet that plots your performance against various popular race distances over the year. You are put into a category according to your age and sex. You need an entry level result to get a copper, and then increasingly faster for bronze, silver, gold and diamond -with your four highest counting. When first announced, this sounded like a game and I was keen to play!

Since I had already committed to Comrades, the November to October slot meant that I would just do my thing till June and then come and see where the chips lay from there. The other massive factor for this planned procrastination was my May birthday that would elevate me to the 45-49 category and make it all that much more achievable.

I’m guessing by sly design but for me the algorithm is skewed towards shorter distances. I road tested this by suffering to the line in a few marathons and not even gaining the copper result – the intuitive website upload interface told me to “try harder next time”.

With Puffer was dispatched it was time to see what was possible with the limited weekends remaining. Being a deadline driven individual the action plan seemed solid. If I brought my a-game, a Silver classification was not out of reach. Do the club 5 and 8km timetrials and find some 10km and 15km races before the October 31 deadline. These are not normally distances that I would get early out of bed, drive somewhere and queue for a number and a startline. I would rather be doing my thing on the mountain for a much higher distance:hassle factor so this challenge has already achieved opening my horizons.

Thanks to the power of procrastination, this would all need to be done in the deadline month of October – not many second chance opportunities here. First up was the club 8km TT. The algorithm seemed to make it the most achievable and I could see if my fitness was in the same galaxy as my expectations. Somehow Jake and Matthew dragged me on their warmup loop and I hit the ground running hot. Having an average pace to beat seemed like a simple enough plan and I had plenty enough buffer as I came past the club to do that additional 3km loop. Job done with time to spare – this can work!

Next up, a trip to Ysterplaat after work on a Wednesday evening to do 10km on an airbase. While I missed military service I am old enough to know how ridiculous it is to pay to voluntarily run on army property. I made two vital errors on this run. I surely can’t be the first club runner to arrive at a race with his wife’s neatly folded FHAC vest in the kitbag. It was a tight fit that pulled in awkward areas but I seemed to suck in the belly enough to get away with it without weird looks and sniggers on the startline. Secondly, along with me upgrading in age categories my eyesight is fading in sympathy and I managed to set my watch on a cycle. Try converting the required pace of 4:45/km when your watch is giving you km/h and time splits only every 10km. Took me 3km to get the mental maths down, and by then it was a long slog into the South Easter on the runway. Not sure I’d want to land a plane there either, lots of grass in all the cracks currently! I managed to hang on here for a 2^nd silver with some buffer again.

The 5km club TT was next up, and this must be the simplest one to tick off here. 5km is still a long way, so don’t go thinking that Michael Gibson is looking smooth and relaxed and you should follow his pacemaking. I didn’t, which meant I could hang on and again with some time to not have to bust the final km – one more silver to go!

When this all started getting interesting for me, the final allocated weekend had a 15km called the Don Lock memorial in Claremont. I had never heard of this event (or even if I had ever done this distance) but it got a circle in the calendar if required to complete the set. Sure enough a gentle gallop through the burbs of the ‘Mont and the ‘Bosch was a good way to spend a dawning Sunday with 1000+ of my closest deepheat scented sportsmates. For the final time I managed to keep an eye on the clock and get the silver with a bit of a buffer. In the finish zone an unnamed but higher category clubmate remarked that I appeared so comfortable coming past him that I should have gone for the gold standard. Later back to the spreadsheet and he was mistaken, I was nowhere close. That’s going to have to be a project for next year and I’m signed up.

Have you done your standards? Well they close this week, so get your time submitted into the portal here, and if you are one short I expect to see you at the club TT to get that 5km or 8km into the books.