Thoughts on a smugprickness rating

Inspired by an article shared on a certain parkrun discussion group on Facebook entitled “98% Of Couples Who Go Jogging Together Are Smug Pricks, Finds Study” I decided to attempt to quantify a smugprickness rating.

I originally posted “I think that running the same parkrun should get an higher score, but finishing far apart should diminish it, but I’m not sure what other factors should be involved?”

Parkruns run together could be calculated with just one extra field, added to my database, as could the difference in finishing positions (in fact both could be served by the same field as the presence of a difference score could be counted?)

A1214775 and A2329944 have run together 22 times, with the total difference in finishing positions being 3225. Whilst this data alone would allow a mean difference to be calculated ( 147 for those keeping count) this is not satisfactory as a rating.

I did consider using the total number of runs as a factor, but short of replicating the entire results database of each party it would be impossible to create a bi-directional rating, which as this is referring to couples is quite an important feature. It is however quite easy to count the number of Saturdays since the first time the same parkrun was run.

For A1214775 and A2329944 their first parkrun together was on 2016-04-02, 254 weeks ago, some simple maths produces a runtogether rating of 12 .

An ideal mean difference would be 1 (I guess it would be 0 but parkrun does not condone that sort of togetherness at parkruns), an ideal runtogether rating would also be 1, that is to say that every possible run was run together.

For want of any better ideas I divided 10 by each of these numbers, and then multiplied them together to produce a number between #DIV/0! and several thousand, but typically between 0.00 and 100.

For A1214775 and A2329944 this results in a score of 0.02 %, which seems about right for me.

I now place this at the mercy of the community, who I am sure will be able to find within many faults.

List of events run together

I stoped tracking this at the end of 2019.