"Largest and most recent marathon study" makes me feel like a pretty fast hobby jogger

“In order to avoid any influence of professional sports within our results of recreational runners, we omitted any elite runners and runners with a finish time that was less than 2:30:00 for men and 2:45:00 for women.”

“Professional” = Barely fast enough to go D1

(I know Marathon isn’t a D1 distance, but most good 5k/10k guys could if they tried)

First thought is that the Boston qualifying times for 0-49 year olds are pretty silly based off of that data. You didnt really see any uptick in average times until people got into their 50s.

I'm like superwoman according to that!

The fastest averages for women in 2014 was from Ukraine with a time of 4:08:48

Nice!!!

Oh wow... I feel like the only reason this thread was made was so a bunch of genetically above average runners can compare themselves to average runners and basically cream themselves over the fact that they’re slightly better. ? To think that the elites would feel the same about your 2:59 finish times but they are already validated and great, they don’t need to look at stats to know they’re great but yet they’re humble enough to not care.

We omitted Japan, Malaysia, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Lithuania, and The United Arab Emirates due to some questions pertaining to the data.

This was a singularly uninformative study. It probably only shows what nations have lots or few slow joggers participating in marathons. With all that data, they could have put together some useful percentile breakdowns of marathon times.

I read somewhere a while ago that fewer than 5% of people completing Half Marathons are finishing in 90mins or under. I was incredulous, and thought it would obviously be influenced by the particular race and treatment of data (exclusion of outliers etc.).

Being curious, I crunched the numbers on a few races I did last year and it was basically correct. Participants basically fell on a bell curve that increased sharply around 1:45 and tapered off after 2:10.

These were relatively small events though, with no pros.

Radical CJ wrote:

I read somewhere a while ago that fewer than 5% of people completing Half Marathons are finishing in 90mins or under. I was incredulous, and thought it would obviously be influenced by the particular race and treatment of data (exclusion of outliers etc.).

Being curious, I crunched the numbers on a few races I did last year and it was basically correct. Participants basically fell on a bell curve that increased sharply around 1:45 and tapered off after 2:10.

These were relatively small events though, with no pros.

Yeah local big race usually has a median time of 2.00

“Professional” wrote:

“In order to avoid any influence of professional sports within our results of recreational runners, we omitted any elite runners and runners with a finish time that was less than 2:30:00 for men and 2:45:00 for women.”

“Professional” = Barely fast enough to go D1

(I know Marathon isn’t a D1 distance, but most good 5k/10k guys could if they tried)

So they have defined what 'recreational' is before crunching the data. Therefore this study is totally and utterly meaningless.

They've introduced a huge bias by cutting out a proportion of their data based on a preconceived idea. How can you use this data to determine the average marathon time of recreational runners if you cherry pick the times?!

I see so many studies where the authors seem to completely misunderstand statistics.

At last all of LRC can party and sing "We are the champions"

ex-runner wrote:

“Professional” wrote:

“In order to avoid any influence of professional sports within our results of recreational runners, we omitted any elite runners and runners with a finish time that was less than 2:30:00 for men and 2:45:00 for women.”

“Professional” = Barely fast enough to go D1

(I know Marathon isn’t a D1 distance, but most good 5k/10k guys could if they tried)

So they have defined what 'recreational' is before crunching the data. Therefore this study is totally and utterly meaningless.

They've introduced a huge bias by cutting out a proportion of their data based on a preconceived idea. How can you use this data to determine the average marathon time of recreational runners if you cherry pick the times?!

I see so many studies where the authors seem to completely misunderstand statistics.

I don't think the impact of the "elites" at mass participation events would even move the median times by more than a grand total of several seconds.

Anecdote:

Local half marathon to me [san jose] had 23 males under this threshold [I used 1:13 being generous as equivalent to 2:30, in reality I probably should have picked 1:11, so the # is fewer]. This race unlike many has an elite wave and a solid 10 finishers under/about/around 1:04--1:05, winner was around 1:03, so similar to the Houston race recently.

There was an astounding 12000 or so hobbyjoggers after this. Do I need to perform the calculation for the weighted average movement that excluding these 23 participants had? lets assume that 2x the females also met this standard, for a grand total of 70 runners out of around 12000.

If the median is 2:10, and these 70 runners [including the females] all came in around 1:10 median, we are excluding a delta of (drumroll, wait for it): 39.1 seconds to the median participant if we put these 70 runners back in

So the fundamental flaw to me is in suggesting that the elites move the needle of the median finishing time, and that a study which posts its methodology and assumptions and then performs those calculations faithfully somehow doesn't understand statistics, or sampling, or what manipulation of a given data set is permitted or logical