Rob Phillips holds onto his lead in August's Reward Running

Halfway leader Rob Phillips has managed to maintain his pole position in August’s edition of Reward Running where there are four spot prizes (Sennheiser headphones) up for grabs in addition to an adidas mi-coach for the overall winner and Sennheiser headphones for the remaining athletes in the top ten.

A category 4 athlete, Phillips started the month with a handicap of 27.34 and has already reduced that to 17.44 (a handicap improvement of 9.90) to give himself a significant cushion at the top of the pile!

Graeme Dunbar is currently in second place with a handicap improvement of 5.77 while Andrew Burgess-tupling is in third with an improvement of 4.96. 

Keeley Howson is the leading female in fifth overall having started the month with a handicap of 29.90 and reducing that to 26.14.

If you haven’t entered Reward Running before, here are a few things you need to know!

The Reward Running top 10 consists of the runners who have improved their handicap the most in that month (make sure you’ve claimed your free runbritain handicap first!), but within the top 10, one place is reserved for the most improved in each of the four handicap categories:

1: 5 or under

2: 6-12

3: 13-20

4: 21 or above

There is also one place reserved for the most improved runner that has run at least 10 races in the year before the competition month. 

To sign up for Reward Running you must first have claimed your free runbritain handicap, and if you haven’t done so already, here are five great reasons to do that right now:

1. It’s a unique handicap system for running. Just like golf you get a handicap from 0.0 – 36.0 giving runners of all abilities the chance to benchmark their progress and compare their results across a range of terrains and distances. The score automatically updates each time you race (once you have claimed) and rewards regular racing as well as automatically factoring in a degree of difficulty on races that are multi-terrain, hilly or windy.

2. You can be part of the National Running Ladder and check out where your handicap puts you compared to every other runner in the UK, e.g. does your 5k time put you higher than your friend’s half marathon and marathon times?

3. Having a handicap enables you to be part of ‘Reward Running’ (as described above!) and be in with a chance of winning an adidas mi-coach or Sennheiser headphones if your score shows the greatest improvement - it’s free to enter too

4. Find out where your times put you in the official UK road rankings

5. And finally...log your training mileage, watch your progress graph rise and check out head-to-heads with your training partners.

All the information you need is on the runbritain rankings site.