A word about snowshoe rankings

As most of you know, there's quite a few folks putting out snowshoe rankings each week and each person does it slightly different. Being one of those folks, I can tell you it ain't easy but it's a lot of fun trying to figure it out each week. I think deep down most of us like to know how we do against our peers, even if we don't always race head to head each week. I encourage you to check them all out.

Chris Dunn (acidotic RACING) publishes a weekly Northeast Snowshoe Racing Ranking, showing the top 10 Men and Women snowshoers in the Northeast.

Dave Dunham publishes OPEN MEN and MASTER MEN (40+) Snowshoe Rankings each week on his blog.

And of course I put out my version of snowshoe rankings called WOLFE TRACKS.  I've expanded the rankings to include both MEN and WOMEN in OPEN, MASTER (40+), SENIOR (50+) and YOUTH (<19).

Now, regarding my rankings: time to change my scoring method....again. Up to now I've tried to factor in 'strength of field', giving more credit to racers who show up when the field is stacked. Moody Springs shot that method all to heck. So I'm going back to a simple "% back from the winners time" scoring:  
WINNER TIME/YOUR TIME*100

The goal is simple: come up with the easiest method that generally reflects reality for the OPEN MEN division, figuring if it works for that division it should work for all the other divisions (some which I'm not as familiar with the racers). For the record, I am now tracking nearly 900 individuals.

I also looked at each division separately to make sure I was including a large enough sample size, so some divisions have 'minimum 3 races' and some have 'minimum 2 races'. Beneath each division will be the number of races required for ranking plus the total number of racers in that division that meet that requirement. The only slight change I made was I dropped your lowest scored race if you raced more than 4 times, otherwise your score is just an average of all your races.