Now that a new season is underway, it's time to start a new Free Spirits meta-nonathlon season too!
For newcomers, here is a quick summary.
What is the Free Spirits meta-nonathlon?
The meta-nonathlon compares your nonathlon scores with those of your previous season. In essence, you are competing against your former self. Using nonathlon points has a couple of advantages:
- a fair number of Free Spirits are doing the nonathlon anyway; no extra actions from the participants are required and the rules of the meta-nonathlon should be intuitive to nonathlon participants;
- scores get age adjusted (as well as adjusted by weight class and gender) by the nonathlon, which can be especially attractive to rowers beyond their natural peak;
- the nonathlon uses most of the C2 ranking pieces, so there is a nice spread of erg distances, from 500m to a full marathon.
The scores will then be sorted into a Free Spirits meta-nonathlon ranking that shows who is doing the best job in improving on last year.
How does it work?
The scores will be calculated per piece in a simple way: for every piece (500m, 1k, 2k, etc.) your 2016 nonathlon score will be divided by the 2015 score. The outcome is then multiplied by 100, giving a percentage as your score for that distance. So, managing a better score on a piece than in the previous season gives you a score over 100. The scores are rounded off to whole numbers, for easy-view purposes (showing decimals makes the sheet look messy).
Just like in the nonathlon itself, the total score is calculated as the sum of the nine best individual scores (out of all 10). There is no bonus for doing all 10 distances though.
If you haven't entered a time/distance for a piece in the previous season, the score to beat will be equal to your highest score in that previous year. In my case, I didn't do a FM in the 2015 season. If I decide to do one in 2016, the 2015 benchmark is set at 873, which was my highest score in 2015. There is a threshold of 5 ranked pieces though, so If you entered less than 5 nonathlon scores in the previous season, the benchmark for unentered pieces will be set at 1000 instead of the highest ranked score. The sheet is sorted by the total score, so it still pays to do as much of the pieces as possible, even if you didn't enter a result in the season before.
Where is it?
I will occasionally post a picture of the table in this thread, but you can always view it here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing
You can see in the left upper corner when the list was last updated. For most of last year I managed to do weekly updates and that's what I'd like to do this season as well.
All but one Free Spirit on the nonathlon 2016 so far, I could connect to their 2015 names, Chayn (Claire) being the exception. This means we have 22 names in the meta-nonathlon right now. Well, 21 names and 1 number, who coincidentally is our first leader: Christopher Lloyd.
Happy meta-nonathlonning!
*EDIT: changed the URL and published the google doc, so it should be view-able now.
so apart from thanking Roger for setting up a challenge in a way that I had a good chance of winning, I won't bore everyone with a long speech 
Go for it!
