True Age Grading for the devoted runner.
Standard age grading compares you to world records — an impossibly high bar that makes most recreational runners feel like they're permanently failing. TAG Running takes a different approach: benchmark yourself against your local Parkrun course records instead. A fairer, more honest read on where you actually stand.
The challenge
Before building anything, I looked at what already existed. The tools were there — but they were designed around the wrong people. Researching the existing age grading landscape made the problem immediately clear.
What already existed
01
Limited visibility and usability
The tools that existed were hard to find, harder to read, and built without any consideration of user experience. Outdated HTML forms with no visual hierarchy — outputs that even a technically confident runner would struggle to interpret.
02
Elite comparisons, recreational runners
Traditional age grading tables compare performance to world-record pace. For recreational Parkrun runners, this produces scores so low — often below 30% — that they feel meaningless. The tools were designed by and for competitive athletes, then handed to everyone else.
03
Course difficulty disconnect
Every Parkrun course is different. Hills, terrain, surface — they all affect finishing times significantly. Grading a runner on a hilly course against the same world-record standard as someone on a flat one produces a fundamentally unfair result.
04
Opaque, unexplained scoring
A raw percentage with no context. Existing tools showed runners a number and stopped there. No plain-language explanation of what it meant, how it compared to others at their venue, or what they'd need to do to improve it.
The approach
1
User discovery
Before wireframing anything, I looked at who was actually searching for this kind of tool. Parkrun attracts recreational runners — people running on Saturday mornings for community and personal challenge, not competition. The data was revealing: women represent over 40% of Parkrun participants, but were almost entirely absent from age grading discussions and existing tool audiences. The tools had defaulted to "male first" in every input, every example, every result. That shaped a specific UX decision early.
Design decision
No default gender selection. Runners choose their category before the form submits — an intentional friction point that treats every user as equally likely, rather than treating one as the assumed case.
2
Visual storytelling
Raw percentages are abstract. Adding 0.1% to your age grade is technically an improvement — but it doesn't feel like one. The decision was to translate the result into something visual: a dynamic progress chart that fills as your time approaches the course record. The end of the bar isn't an arbitrary benchmark — it's the fastest person your age has run that exact course. Someone real. Someone local.
Design decision
The chart doesn't start at zero — it starts at a "reasonable recreational runner" baseline, so the bar feels meaningful from the first input rather than overwhelming. Seeing a bar at 60% full feels very different to reading "60%" in a table.
3
Scoring over percentages
Traditional grading gives you 42.73%. TAG gives you a score out of 1000. The same information, reframed. A higher integer grows more visibly than a decimal-point percentage — and with a ceiling at 1000 rather than 100%, there's more psychological headroom to improve. The scoring system borrows from gaming: the goal post moves, but it always feels reachable. Going from 412 to 438 in a month reads like progress. Going from 41.2% to 43.8% reads like rounding error.
Design decision
The maximum is 1000, but displayed scores are rounded to the nearest integer — no decimals. This keeps the output clean and avoids false precision. A runner who improves by 3 seconds should see a meaningful jump in their score, not a 0.12% nudge.
4
UI anchored in the ecosystem
Parkrun's visual identity is red and green. TAG's colour system deliberately echoes it — not to mimic, but to anchor. Runners arriving from Parkrun should feel immediately at home. The typography is clean, the layout single-column, and the only bright accent on any result page is the progress bar. Everything else recedes so the number — and the sentence that explains it — can do the work.
Design decision
Every result includes a single plain-language sentence — written as UX copy, not a tooltip. "You're running faster than 68% of people your age at this course." That sentence carries more weight than any number, and it required more careful writing than any component in the UI.
What's in it
Course-specific benchmarking
Your grade is calculated against records set at your specific Parkrun course by runners in your age category — not global tables, not world records. The benchmark is local and real.
Personal growth insights
Run the same course twice and compare your TAG scores. The question isn't just where you are — it's where you're going. The tool is built around longitudinal improvement, not a one-time snapshot.
Visualised goal-setting
The progress chart shows exactly how much time you'd need to drop to move your score meaningfully — translating abstract grading into a concrete target time. A goal you can train towards.
UX writing built in
Every result includes a plain-language interpretation — a sentence that turns a score into a story. Written to encourage rather than inform, because recreational runners need context, not data dumps.
What's next