Quote Originally Posted by Bob View Post
...With the concept of fell race records, these are only updated when they get broken so the assumption is that "no-one" has got near the record since they were set. If the fastest three or five winning times were recorded you'd see that this isn't the case...
Good point

since I only have access to results via this website, I can only go back to 2004 so...

looking at the TOPS Rankings (PowerOf10 as was) for "world class" performances, we find a dearth of athletes having entered the UK All-Time lists since start of 2004:
5k - 2 of 50 (Mo Farah, Andy Baddeley)
10k track - 1 of 51 (Mo Farah)
10k road - 1 of 26 (Mo Farah)
Half Mara - er, none.
Marathon - 2 of 52 (Jon Brown, Thomas Abyu)

without having done the research yet, who wants to bet that I don't find a much more significant proportion of record/close-to-record performances in long-established/same-route fell races...?

[even allowing for the fact that in some years conditions will have made close-to-record performances impossible on some courses]