This site exists because of a simple frustration: race results tell you where you finished, but they don’t tell you how well you actually ran. A 22-minute 5K means something different at 35 than it does at 65. Age grading fixes that by comparing your performance to the standard for your age, and once you see your numbers that way, you can’t unsee them.
I ran into the same frustration in a different sport this year, and it led to another solution.
The golf version of the same problem
Every golfer has looked up a club distance chart. They’re everywhere, and they all share the same flaw: they publish a single set of “average” numbers with no indication of who that average describes.
It’s the running equivalent of publishing one marathon time and calling it the standard. Useful to nobody in particular.
The variable that matters in golf is swing speed, and the spread is enormous. A player swinging 85 mph and one swinging 105 mph don’t belong in the same table — the difference is around 50 yards of driver carry and more than a club through the irons. Yet the charts lump everyone together.
Building it
The modeling approach turned out to be familiar. Age grading works by taking established performance standards and scaling them to an individual. The golf problem has the same shape: take validated reference data — TrackMan’s tour measurements, plus aggregated amateur data from shot-tracking systems covering millions of real shots — and scale the whole bag to one person’s actual numbers.
The part I find most useful is the calibration mode. Rather than starting from an average, you enter two or three carry distances you already trust from a launch monitor, and the model fits your entire bag around them using a least-squares approach. It also reports how well your entries agree with each other, which quietly tells you when one of your “known” numbers is optimistic.
Anyone who has tried to nail down their true 5K pace from a handful of inconsistent race results will recognize the problem.
What it does
The tool is at YourCarryDistances.com. It’s free, there’s no signup, and it:
- builds a carry distance chart for every club in your bag
- flags gapping problems (clubs that overlap, and distance holes)
- estimates your swing speed if you don’t know it
- prints a passport-sized yardage card for your bag
If you play golf as well as run — a not uncommon combination among masters athletes, in my experience — it may save you a few strokes. Mostly by convincing you to take more club, which the data says nearly all of us should.
The common thread
Both calculators start from the same conviction: generic averages are a poor substitute for your own numbers, and most people never bother to find their own numbers because the arithmetic is tedious.
That’s what these tools are for. The arithmetic is the easy part to automate. The hard part — going out and measuring honestly — is still yours.