Every race except for the Simon Turkey Trot in December has team prizes for men and women. There are 3 categories for men and women: A, B & C. Each runner is assigned a rank based on past performance or a default rank if it is their first race. What category a team of runners ends up in at a given race depends on the rankings of the individual runners in that team.
For men, a default rank of 1 is given.
For women, the default is 20.
Anybody who has a default value more than likely hasn’t run as we update these after every race.
- For men’s teams, the summed rank of each 3 consecutive men from the same company determines if they go into category A, B or C. Then their positions are summed to give them a total team score.
- For women’s teams, the summed rank of each 2 consecutive women from the same company determines if they go into category A, B and C again. Their positions are summed to give a total team score.
Thankfully all this is done by Excel!
All teams are sorted by category and then team scores. The top teams per category are the winners.
Table below shows total sum of ranks per category.
| Men | Women | |
| A | 1-27 | 1-40 |
| B | 28-37 | 41-49 |
| C | 38 up | 50 up |
The winning team from a given company may not be the first 3 men or first 2 women from that company across the line. The first team may have come 4th in A but the team that wins could be 2nd in C.
The main thing here is that nobody has a category; they have a rank. It totally depends who else ends up on their team purely by where they finish in the race. You might sometimes see a men’s team in A score high and come 3rd. This is usually because there are only 3 teams in A and the 3rd team are new runners who have default ranks of 1. Their rank gets updated after and this will not happen again. If there were 3 “proper” teams in A, this newbie team wouldn’t win as team scores would be low.