#clickyourclock wins European Athletics Innovation Category at Golden Tracks Awards
This weekend, the European Athletics Golden Tracks awards ceremony took place and #clickyourclock was presented with the overall prize for innovation.
Back in September, #clickyourclock was named as one of three contenders for the overall Innovation Award and Geoff Wightman, former MD of runbritain and Gavin Lightwood, Road Race Coordinator were invited to the ceremony.
The award for the Innovation Category was the first to be handed out on the night and pictured are Geoff (left) and Gavin (middle) being presented with the award by Vice President of European Athletics, Jean Gracia.
#clickyourclock is our weekly competition that runs from March to October and has been designed to promote the runbritain handicap scoring system which, itself, has been designed to support the runner's transition into racing and continuous progression towards individual running targets and goals.
The handicap scoring system tracks every runner of every level that participates in runbritain licensed events and parkruns. The entry level score is set at 36.0 with the lowest handicap score currently belonging to Mo Farah who is on MINUS 8.1. The system encourages personal progression but also allows runners to compare themselves against others within the overall population, gender, age group and postcode and places each runner on the National Ladder.
Geoff Wightman, the managing director of runbritain from 2008 - 2016 said, "We are delighted to have been named as winners in the Innovation Category and I would like to thank the whole team whose efforts made this possible. Gavin Lightwood has almost trebled the number of licensed results that feed the #clickyourclock system during his post and Tim Grose and Hayley Livesey, of Athletics Data, have been brilliant in designing the software and collating the results every Wednesday throughout the year."
Some facts about #clickyourclock
We had a grand total of 16,554 entries this year.
Of these, 9792 (59%) actually improved their handicap that week.
Of all the entrants, they were made up of 5706 different athletes so, on average, each athlete entered three times or every two months. You could, of course, only enter if you had actually raced or done a parkrun that week.
The competition ran for 25 weeks starting 16th March and the last date was 6th Sept.
The highest weekly entrants was 911 in the week starting 27th April.
Numbers increased from previous years, perhaps through brand recognition and perhaps because of the change in drawing the prize from the pool of all runners that had improved their handicap that week as opposed to the “highest” improvement which much favoured new runners in previous years.
Every winner claimed their prize too!
There was celebration, too for our ladder leader, Mo Farah, at the Golden Tracks awards night, who was named male European Athlete of the Year for the third time. He also won the title in 2011 and 2012.