Getting Slower but Moving Up in Age Grading

After I posted on Monday about my 1 mile race results over the years, race buddy Tom R tweeted me after he ran my numbers through whatever app he uses to graph things out:

Here were those 2 images taken from my mile times in this post:

My times trending slower over the years...


... but my age graded results treading better!

As the first graph shows, the "trend line" for my 1 mile times started at 4:54 in 2008 and is now at 4:58 fourteen years later in 2022. And the 2nd graph shows my age graded results getting better: starting around 76.5% and ending just shy of 80%! So as Tom noted, I'm slowing down an average of 0.3 seconds/year, but my age grading is going up 0.25% each year. So if this trend continues (THIS IS A JOKE), I'll be in the 90th percentile and considered "world class" when I'm 81 years old! #Goals

Oh, and to SLIGHTLY correct those graphs, the 2018 times should be flip-flopped. (Tom didn't know that as I only had my results posted by year with no indication of specific order within years.) I ran my slowest 1 mile in the spring of 2018, and then put in some solid 1 mile training to bust out a faster race mid-summer. So here I quickly (and crappily) took out 2 blue lines and added 2 thicker black lines to make this truly chronological:

So I had my slowest 1 mile and then came back to crank out a faster one in 2018...


... and therefore my age graded results got better at the end of 2018, not worse.

And a final interesting side-note: my faster 2012 mile was the same time as my 2022 mile. Here's their difference on the age graded scale being I was 10 years older:

Nearly 4 percentage points better as an old man! :)