Greatest Ever wrote:
The best marathon in the history of the world. Hands down. I think we have all 10 of ESPNs top plays of the day and of the week.
The races were very, very exciting and Davila's bid for victory was truly special.
That being said, your statements go way to far. The times were amazing but so the tailwind was equally as amazing.
I remember back in college when Obadele Thompson ran 9.69 for 100m in a college meet at UTEP in 1996 back when the world record was 9.85.
No one in their right mind called it the greatest performance in history as the tail-wind was an ridiculous 5.7 mps (the time converts to 9.93 with no wind or 9.95 dependig on who you are talking to).
Well today let's say the winds were roughly 20 mph (i saw 19 with gusts to 33 mph).
What does a 20 mph wind convert to in mps? 8.9408(20 miles x 1609.344 meters / 3600 seconds) . Nearly twice as much as Thompson's.
As we pointed out in our pre-race article, which we entitled "Once In A (Marathon) Lifetime Weather Conditions Forecast For Boston On Monday", that is worth a ton of time. How much? Some like JK might say 3-4 minutes.
If you don't want to believe me, do the following. Go to the wind/conversion site that exists for sprinting.
http://myweb.lmu.edu/jmureika/track/wind/index.htmlInput today's performances. Mutai's marathon time today comes out to him running 17.49496883 per 100 meters.
Input 8.9408 for the wind and input 70 meters for altitude (as the race roughly starts at 70m of altitude and finishes at 0) and you end up with an equivalent time of 17.83 seconds per 100 meters if run with zero wind at sea level.
Multiply that by 421.94988 (there are 421.95 100 meter segments in a marathon)to get the total time for the marathon of 7523.36636 seconds or 2:05:24.
Now that's not 3-4 minutes but you get my point. It's worth a lot. When JK actually wakes up from his nap (I think he's been asleep all day), I'll ask him about that sprint/conversion chart. But he was clearly proven to yet again be a genius today.
It sort of reminds me of when I used to run road races. I would only run road races that were certified as I couldn't stand it when there would be clearly a short course and hear people counting it as their PR. If you run 5 road certified road races at 15:10 and then one day run 14:30 on a non-certified course, you shouldn't say your PR is 14:30 as it was likely short.