Refreshing our Club Standards
1 December 2025 - By James Attenborough
Firstly, what are Club Standards?
Information on our club standards can be found here, Club Standards – Witham Running Club.
In short, achieve four of the times within your age category in that time period of five years you will receive a small memento for your Trophy/Medal display. You will only receive one award per each age category unless of course you for example, complete Bronze then Silver, you will receive two awards.
How are they calculated?
They were set at the following percentages back in January 2017.
Diamond standard represents achieving 79% of the world’s best time, Gold 71%, Silver 63% and Bronze 55%. These are based on the WAVA times. For those in the Open category, the times are taken from you being 27 years old.
A good explanation of WAVA can be found on the parkrun website: 4.5 Age grading – parkrun Support
Why are they being refreshed?
The WAVA times are updated every five years, so as our current times are based on the times from 2015, there have been two updates since. Due to things like trainer technology and general advances in things like training and nutrition, the world times have of course moved on. Some of the time changes are negligible but some have moved on by a fair few minutes. The club standards starting from 2026 will be based on the 2025 times, and these will be the times until December 31st, 2030.
What is changing?
As you’ll note the standards go up in increments of 8%, so we have decided to introduce a brand-new Platinum Standard at 87%.
We are also introducing a brand-new Copper Standard set at 47%.
Other Questions:
- What if I already have 1-3 of the standard times, can I carry these forward? Yes you can, but to complete your standard you will need to achieve the distance (s) missing at the new time.
- Can I re-attain the standard more than once in my age category? You can only earn each standard once per age category, you can however of course work up, but not down the standards. I.e you can achieve Silver then Gold but not Gold then Silver. Your category is your age on the day of the race e.g. if you turn 45 the day after a race you will be in the V40 category for that result.
- Why is there no M35 category? We use standard UK Athletics age categories.
- What races qualify? All internal club 5ks and all affiliated races with a course measurement.
- Where did we find the times? Training – Reverse Age-Grading Calculator – Fetcheveryone.com
I will keep updating these Other Questions as no doubt some of you will have a few.
Meanwhile, please note the spreadsheet attached which is broken into the relevant TABs. The website will be updated in January.
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