Concept2’s Online Ranking—What Exactly Is It?

May 1 is the rollover date for the annual Concept2 Online Ranking. But what's the Online Ranking? And why might you be interested in checking it out?

When it first started, the name “World Ranking” was largely aspirational. It included an international collection of erg scores, but it was quite small—mostly the results of the first indoor rowing competition—the 1982 C.R.A.S.H.-B. Sprints. All these years later, it's long-since outgrown the printed format and transitioned to the current online version.

The Online Ranking now holds the best efforts of over a quarter million people from 197 countries. What started simply as a collection of best times for 2k on the RowErg, has grown to include 13 different events, and all three Concept2 ergs.

Q. Is the Online Ranking only for fast people?
A. No, it’s for everyone. It can provide a great training goal to anyone. It gives all participants a metric of where they stand relative to others of their age and gender from around the world.

Q. How do you join it?
A. After you do one of the rankable workouts, go to your Online LogBook, and you will see a button that says “RANK”. Simply click on it, and your workout will be ranked.

Q. Which events are rankable?
A. For the RowErg and SkiErg: 1 minute, 4 minute, 30 minutes, 60 minutes, 100m, 500m, 2000m, 5000m, 6000m, 10k, half-marathon (21,097m), marathon (42,195m) and 100k metres.
For the BikeErg: 1 minute, 30 minutes, 60 minutes, 200m, 500m, 1000m, 4000m, 10k, 20k, 40k, 100k.

Q. Can I check out the rankings without joining?
A. Yes! It’s a searchable database. Visit log.concept2.com/rankings and choose the event, age class, gender, erg that you are interested in.

Q. How can I use it to give myself training goals?
A. First, start doing the ranking pieces, and do enough of them that you have a good cross-section of them. Then rank them, to see where you stand. (Or you can just look at the ranking, and see where you would stand if you ranked them.) Are you in the top quarter, 2nd quarter, 3rd quarter, or 4th quarter? Now you can set some goals for yourself in each time or distance. Can you gain performance and move up a quarter? Next, note whether you rank better on shorter events or longer events. See our "Is my Time (or Distance) “Good”?" blog post for more on this.

Q. How can it help guide my training?
A. If you tend to do better on longer events than shorter events, you may need to change up your training a bit to include more shorter intervals geared toward the shorter distance. And vice versa, if you’re already good at the short events. You can read more about this here: Using the Online Ranking as a Training Tool.

For some added inspiration, check out Morgan McGrath's story. Morgan had no idea she was close to the top of her age group on the SkiErg until she discovered the Online Rankings.