Race The Machine

* An achievable time to beat, based on your ability now
* The times you are given through the series adjust with you
* 7 races in the series to choose from
* Complete 4 races to receive a red Race The Machine buff
* Complete 7 races to receive a black Machine Accomplished buff
* Social Media Pics on entry

⏱️Enter a race and you will be given an achievable time to try to beat. This will be calculated from your previous Race The Machine time or an estimated 5K time if this is your first race.

🗓️ You have until the last day of the next month to run your race and upload your evidence here: https://racethemachine.co.uk/submit-evidence/ Win or lose your result will be added to our results tables.

🤖 Complete 4 races and you will receive a red Race The Machine buff in the post!

🏆 Complete all 7 distances to join the exclusive “Machine Accomplished” club and receive a black Machine Accomplished buff in the post.

🏃‍♂️Remember, your time to beat is based on your potential with suitable training.

Whilst it would be nice to do so, not every entrant will beat every Machine as they progress through the virtual race series. Race The Machine is about encouraging entrants to work hard, and the times you are given will adjust with your performance level.

If you beat The Machine by a wide margin things will get a little harder in your next race as we want to see you progress. Beat your time narrowly and the difficulty level will stay roughly the same. If you lose to The Machine things will get easier in your next race.

Winning is about, patience and self-improvement over time, so even if you lose a race please upload your time. If nothing else you will be one step closer to completing the series. You will receive a red buff once you have completed 4 races, and a black Machine Accomplished buff once you complete the 7 race series.

For beginners and those who are a little nervous we would recommend 3km as a good starting point. New runners should also leave the 10 Miles and Half Marathon until later. That’s not because the times to beat for these races won’t be achievable for you, but because it takes more time to build up to longer distances you have never run before.

For more experienced runners take your pick and enter the races in any order. Check out Laura’s journey through Race The Machine here: https://racethemachine.co.uk/virtual-race-series-laura/

Race The Machine is about getting runners of all levels working towards targets tailored to their ability. We want you to put in effort, but we also want you to beat The Machine and believe you can.

How difficult is Race The Machine? Like the most satisfying run it is an achievable rewarding effort.

The basis of how we work out your time to beat is a formula devised by Pete Riegel, a research engineer and runner, which has been widely used for over 20 years.

We take that formula and add a Race The Machine cushion, that cushion is gently removed as you progress.

There are a couple of things to note about the time we give you: we assume you’ve done appropriate training for the distance.

Just because you’ve done a 22-minute 5K today doesn’t mean you can do a 01:39:00 Half Marathon tomorrow. We assume that you don’t have a natural significant bias towards either speed or endurance.

We understand that you may not be in good shape, or feel confident about racing right now, but that shouldn’t stop you.

The time we give you will be based on your ability now. Once you provide us with a prediction of how fast you can run 5K, we believe that with suitable training you can beat the time we give you.