Purdy pictures 1500m to marathon (1960-2009)

Interesting the slight upward tren 2000 on - should we say EPO ?

What are the yellow lines on the 1500 and marathon indicating?

Yea late 90's trend and on is pretty obvious. Should be interesting the next 20 years from now.

How's the fastest line beneath the world record mark on some years? Or am I misinterpreting it?

why do I look at these things - it is way too depressing. Turns out I don't actually want to see the world as it is.

I think the 25th best line is a good one to look at. It's still improving for the most part, which to me means that there hasn't been any substantial change in drug use recently (or that only the best people were using and stopped, I suppose).

Thanks for posting these, Malmo.

Can you make one of these for the U.S.?

It looks to me like the 1500 has been slowing down, the 3000, 5000, and 10000 have leveled off and may be slowing a little, and the marathon is still getting faster. This suggests that the fastest possible times for humans have been reached for 1500-10000, but not for the marathon. It would be interesting to see similar graphs for 100-800.

The key indicators of drug use and the appearance of new drugs are the level highlighted areas on the blue and purple curves. The slowing trends on all but the 1500 seem inconclusive, but it really looks like the fastest runners in the 1500 and 5000 have been getting cleaner, but not the ones in the 10th-25th range.

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p.s. For those who are confused, the bold lines are best-fit curves, not actual data, and the narrow curves only represent real data at intervals of 1 year.

Uhhhh wrote:

How's the fastest line beneath the world record mark on some years? Or am I misinterpreting it?

The fastest line looks like a spline fit. Depending on the polynomial order of the fit, it produces varying degrees of artificial wiggles. I wouldn't pay attention to the small wiggles in the fits, just look at the trends.

So how come the US athletes are running faster now than in the 90's?

these are very interesting datasets

Ideas (not even requests really)

- Logarithmic scales?

- Ratio of 10th Ploynomial to World best (1.xx I would guess) for all events on one chart, for purposes of comparison? Maybe normalized to 1960?

cool stuff. many thanx

and the significant improvement in the 60s is due to Lydiard.

Off the Grid wrote:

these are very interesting datasets

Ideas (not even requests really)

- Logarithmic scales?

- Ratio of 10th Ploynomial to World best (1.xx I would guess) for all events on one chart, for purposes of comparison? Maybe normalized to 1960?

Excel only provides up to a 6th order polynomial regression. While that does a pretty good job at showing the trend, be aware that the end of the curve gets exaggerated somewhat like holding a whip in your hand.

A couple of comments:

The consistent flattening out/uptick of the trends across all events except the marathon, might very well be consistent with the advent of EPO testing. No one can deny that. It can also mean that we are finally reaching the height of human performance given the current talent pool size. Then again some of the 10th fastest curve drops might be distorted by an improbabe syzygy of the extreme outliers - Morcelli, El Guerrouj, Ngeny, Lagt, Tergat, Gebrselassie, Bekele?

Epogen came on to the market in 1988/89. The dramatic drop in performances in all events started in 1991 and pretty much flattened out by 1997, for both the top performances and the 25th fastest level. 1994-1996 showed the largest drops. Whether or not this is related is speculation, even if there are many documented cases of EPO use during this period -- certainly by our sister sport, cycling. The delay in a dramatic performance drop by a few years would certainly be consistent with the critical mass theory that it would take time for the doctors/trainers to implement and perfect their programs.

Or it could be simply related to the confluence of hyper-fast mondo tracks, money, and an increasing pool of athletes from one small tribe in Kenya (1,2). That increased pool of Kenyans was driven by two factors, 1) Kenya has had one of the highest birthrates in the world, and 2) the recruitment and development efforts by Kim McDonald, Gabriel Rosa and others within the Kalenjin villages.

One thing for sure, the notion that Craig Virgin wouldn't have been competitive had he been born 4-8 years later can be thoroughly debunked and put to rest. His 1980 peak performance, without mondo, rabbits and significant competition would have been competitive at the highest levels for a full 12 years later! He would have been in the top ten or on the cusp for a full 22 years! That's assuming that Virgin would not have stepped up his game with more runners around him, which is extremely unlikely, given that Virgin was a raw competitor to the nth degree.

Where you do see a continuing drop in top performances and depth is in the marathon. That would definitely be related to money and mass. You can't teach small, and marathoning is a way for very tiny men from a very small tribe in poverty stricken Kenya to earn and excel. The advantages of small are exaggerated in the most aerobic of running events.

One overlooked factor in the drop of fast marathon times is location, location, location. In the past, traditional course like New York and Boston figured prominently in world lists. Now, hardly at all. In fact, the times at Boston and New York have been remarkably flat over the years, even though it has no problem attracting the best marathoners in the world.

In order to get a respectable time a marathoner needs to go elsewhere.

There has been, within the last 15 years, an increase in the importance of marathon events that provide ideal conditions for fast times. London and Chicago still figure in this category, but now Rotterdam, Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris, etc are now offering increasingly better opportunities for runners seeking fast times. More opportunities for a larger pool plus more money equals faster times. This ain't rocket science.

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(2)

Rakunishu wrote:

Can you make one of these for the U.S.?

If someone will help with the heavy lifting I'll do it. I don't have enough data. Track and Field news used to report metric and imperial measure on separate lists. If we can all agree on factors I might try it.

1500/mile = ?

3 mile/5000 = ?

6 mile/10000 = ?

No we should not.

Because....

a) explain the continued improvement/lack of leveling off in the marathon then? With the "removal" of EPO from the distance running scene (as you seem to suggest occured in the mid's 2000's), then marathon times would not have exploded as they have.

b) after the influx of big $ into running in the late 80's, and then the huge influx of east african runners, yes, as expected, records improved. After those stimuli effecting rapid improvements had been around for awhile, one would expect a bit of a leveling off, as has occurred. Look at the slopes: in general, records have dropped very consistently though the decades. Do we really expect there will never be leveling off periods?

c) if absurdly fast times = epo, then explain why runners like Bekele and Geb (the two most absurdly fast runners) have continued to run magnificently for years, and years, and years, and years, with really little leveling off. With new EPO tests, and increased scrutiny, one would surely expect drug users to back off or get caught, and thus we'd see those guys getting a slower or getting busted. Neither of things happened.

d) new superstars like Wanjiru and Tadesse have emerged and run as well as anyone ever, and have done so in the "post epo" era.

But nice try anyway.