Age and Gender Time Adjustments
in Time Trial results
​“Adjusted times” make it easier to compare times between riders of different ages and sexes. The Veterans Time Trial Association (VTTA) launched the concept in 2023 and we have adapted it for use in our events.
In a nutshell:
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Everyone gets a ‘time adjustment’ based on their age and gender.
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This adjustment is deducted from your actual time to give your adjusted time.
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For example, if your time adjustment is 2 minutes and your actual time was 25m20s, your adjusted time is 23m20s.
Simple as that!
The beauty of this approach is that all riders can compete in the same leagues and competitions and have a more equal chance of being competitive.
We will use adjusted times to calculate league points for the season long road bike and TT bike leagues.
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It also means we can calculate benchmark times for each age / gender which you can use to compare your time against the male course record. So a time of 24m32s for 60 year old female is about the same as the men's course record. This is a bit of additional fun of if you want to work out how your time stacks up.
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Don’t worry, we’ll still publish the actual times too!
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Scroll to the very bottom of this page if you are interested in the detailed method.
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There are also comprehensive adjusted time course records for the club 10 course on the 'who is the fastest?' page
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How did we calculate these?
The VTTA adjustment factors only work for riders aged 40 or above, because the minimum age to ride VTTA events is 40. So we have adapted the VTTA factors to work for riders of all ages. Here is how:
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After analysing our results database, we find the fastest riders on our club course are males aged 29 and 30. So they get a time adjustment of zero - their actual time is the same as their adjusted time.
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These riders are on average 31 seconds faster than males aged 40, so we’ve added on 31 seconds to the VTTA time adjustments for ages 40 and above. This means riders above 40 can be compared to riders aged 29 and 30.
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We’ve used our results database to estimate time adjustments for riders less than 40.
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Riders aged under 29 and 30 also get a time adjustment, because they tend to be a bit slower too. The adjustment is based on differences in average times for male riders of different ages in our database.
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For females, VTTA data shows that female elite times are on average 13% longer than males. To include this in the time adjustments, we take the benchmark time for male riders and add 13%. We use the 2023 male course record of 19m36s for the club 10 mile course as the starting point, and then use the male time adjustments to work out benchmark times for each age. The female benchmarks are 13% longer, and we then use these to calculate the time adjustments for female riders.
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I hope all this makes sense, and well done if you are still reading this!
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This is obviously a method that Cheltenham and County CC have come up with themselves. If anyone wants more info or can suggest an improved approach (perhaps using a much bigger, national dataset of times) then get in touch!