We’ve just published the first edition of road running rankings for club members over the distances of 5k, 10k, half marathon and marathon since the club was established in 1974. The rankings are for men and for women and include an overall top 10, plus top 5 in each of Under 17, Under 20, Under 23 as well as 5 year veterans’ classes from V35 to V70.

The men’s rankings are here:

and the women’s rankings are here:

The rankings are also published on the club athlete rankings page. This edition includes results up to the end of 2023. The intention is to update the rankings each year and to produce a 2024 edition early in 2025.

The rankings demonstrate the strength and breadth of the achievements of club athletes in road running over many years. There are approximately 50 different athletes in the women’s rankings and 80 different athletes in the men’s rankings. For the older age groups in particular a number of the rankings are not populated – simply, we haven’t found 5 results in those age groups at that distance.

With Power of 10, getting recent results is relatively straightforward, but Power of 10 only holds data from the last 20 years or so. For the first 30 years of the club’s history, research for the rankings has involved working through past copies of Athletics Weekly, the Stirling Observer, Scotland’s Runner (1986-93) as well as various other websites of results. We owe many thanks to various people for their assistance in finding past results including Arnold Black, Brian McAusland and Bill Melville.

Most of the ranking entries are from recent performances: around 100 from the latest three years including 40 in 2023. By contrast, there are only around 20 dating from the first 20 years of the club’s existence. There are probably three main reasons for this: firstly standards (and shoes!) have improved; secondly, the results in newspapers and magazines rarely recorded more than the first few in a race, especially for women; and thirdly, road running distances used to be much more varied, with the 5k in particular only emerging as a common race distance in the last 20 years. It is also the case that in the early years most of the club’s activity was among junior athletes running on the track and cross country.

Any questions or corrections on the rankings should be addressed to Hugh Buchanan who will be delighted to be provided with evidence of performances that he has missed.