• Race fairly regularly - handicap is based on your best 5 performances adjusted for course difficulty but weighted towards more recent performances
• Bonuses - you get a bonus if your performance is one of your best three adjusted ones in the preceeding year
• Train efficiently - see our training section
• Join a club or running group
• Don't worry if you have a bad race or just take it easy sometimes - only your best 5 adjusted performances count
• Don't worry if you race on a tough course or day - our algorithm adjusts for this

You are invited to enter our free monthly motivational competition.

Prizes of an Adidas miCoach and Sennheiser headphones will be awarded to 10 runners who improve their handicap most in the month.

Spot prizes of Sennheiser headphones will also be awarded each month.

The runbritain handicap scoring system is a unique way of measuring your progress and comparing yourself with other runners.

As in golf, handicaps go from scratch (zero, or even slightly negative for elite runners) to 36 with increments of 0.1.

To compute your handicap we take a combination of your recent best performances but adjusted by the "SSS" which is our measure of the course difficulty and weather conditions on the day.

This means that you can improve your handicap at any race as on harder courses you won't need to run quite as quickly as on faster ones. See the Time to Improve Panel for more details.

National Ladder

The National Ladder position given here is your ranking out of all the road runners in the UK of your gender. They are just like the rankings in other sports like golf or tennis. See further down the page where you stand in your age group and out of everybody.

Please login to view handicap scores and ladder positions.

The national ladder positions are an indication of where you stand out of all the road runners in the UK. They are just like the rankings in other sports like golf or tennis.

The values given indicate your Overall position amongst everybody, your position among all Men or Women and (unless you are a senior) your position in your own Age Group.

To compute these positions, we order everybody's current runbritain Handicap. Updates to the ladder positions are made every week.