Kelly Jaske story

Mercier tables are only valid if you think that men and womans events have equal depth. That is an assumption that a lot of people question. If you believe woman's events have less depth, the mercier tables over estimate the value of a womans performance.

This is great inspiration for those who start late, that if you got natural talent and just lived a normal life up to your 30's, you could whoop up on elites who do twice a day workouts.

not so far buddy wrote:

From the IAAF scoring tables:

"Due to obvious biological differences, we do not propose to fully compare men’s and women’s performances. Thus, the system contains scoring tables for men’s and women’s events."

http://www.iaaf.org/mm/Document/Competitions/TechnicalArea/ScoringOutdoor2008_742.pdf

Again, Mercier is the only valid tool to compare men and women times.

I've had this debate with you before, when you were posting under a different name. I don't know if you're the California physics teacher who promotes the Mercier calculator, or if you're just someone who stumbled upon his web page and actually believes the self-serving assertion that the calculator is the only valid tool to compare the performances of men and women, but anyone who is familiar with world-class racing performances can see that the Mercier calculator is just a crude little toy that, among other things, ranks the marathon performances of a dozen women as superior to Geb's world marathon record for men, and that declares Paula R.'s performance at the 2003 London marathon to be the equivalent of a sub-2:00 marathon for a man. The poster above states that the Mercier calculator is valid only if you assume that the depth in men's and women's running is the same, but it's actually worse than that, because the calculator doesn't provide a one-to-one mapping of men's and women's performances, but rather extrapolates from a few data points using a very crude mathematical formula.

I've previously explained to you the introductory comment to the IAAF tables, so I'll just repeat what I said then:

"Yes, there are separate scoring tables for the men and the women, because the equivalent performances across events are different for men and women. For example, a 2:19 marathon for a man is considered the equivalent of a 28:46 road 10K for a man, whereas a 2:19 marathon for a woman is considered the equivalent of a 30:21 road 10K for a woman. But the points awarded for the men and women are similarly distributed, so a point total of 1070, for example, reflects approximately the same level of performance within gender for both men and women. Your Mercier calculator acknowledges as much when it provides the 2005 IAAF equivalents, although Mercier comes up with different equivalent performances. As for the accuracy of your somewhat updated (but still out-of-date) Mercier calculator, it now shows a woman's 2:20 marathon to be the equivalent of a 2:02:59.5 marathon for a man. Its updated figures, in other words, produce calculations even more inaccurate than its figures from the late 1990s did, reflecting its inferior methodology."

Regarding the main topic of the thread, Kelly Jaske is obviously a talented runner who has been training hard while staying under the radar of most observers of the national running scene. In that respect, she reminds me a little of another Harvard Law graduate, Dan Schlesinger, who finished third in the 1983 NYC marathon when he was a first-year law student. A lot of people back then were talking about this guy who "came out of nowhere," but the truth was that he had been training like a demon while studying and working overseas in the years leading up to that race. In their 1980 book, "Marty Liquori's Guide for the Elite Runner," Marty Liquori and John Parker put it well: "Because a superior capillary system probably requires more time to develop than any of the other cellular or cardiovascular adaptations, it is probably the reason that the process of developing a world-class distance runner takes a minimum of three to four years. The fondest dreams of Hollywood screenwriters notwithstanding, a sedentary accountant doesn't simply quit his job, run a few miles on the beach with a dog, and then make the Olympic team. People who are going to succeed in distance running are lilke the coal-burning locomotives from days of yore: You can see them coming from a long way off."

Avocados Number wrote:

In that respect, she reminds me a little of another Harvard Law graduate, Dan Schlesinger, who finished third in the 1983 NYC marathon when he was a first-year law student.

Actually, it was the 1982 NYC marathon. (He was third behind Salazar and R. Gomez.) In the spring of 1983, while still a first-year law student, he had a top-ten finish at Boston, running under 2:11. Dan had many talents, worked very hard to develop them, and remained an exceedingly gracious person.

Well hello again A.N.!

I am not going to engage in a long battle with you this time (because I'm still tired from the last one), but I do see that you use fairly derogatory language (crude little toy) to describe the Mercier calculator, and claim it to be "nowhere close to accurate." You have your mathematical reasons for stating this, I am certain, but you then claim that you "would have guessed [Kelly's time] to be closer to the level of a man's 1:05." What is your evidence/argument for this equivalent time? What makes your gender comparisons more valid than those of Mercier? For real, I would like to know how you arrive at your time comparisons.

And how are your hefty cats?

Airbear

To clarify two points, nobody is "hatin on" Kelly Jaske, and nobody is pretending to be a woman, least of all me.

Back to the discussion at hand.

I don't know that there are too many other mainstream sports where a person can come out of recreational obscurity in their 30s and in a very short time make a US team. For most sports getting that USA uniform requires years of participation, competition and training. The fact that it can be done in women's running indicates to me that the depth is not there to make it very competitive.

Once again, congratulations to Kelly on making the team....just in case people still want to jump to incorrect conclusions.

airbear wrote:

Well hello again A.N.!

I am not going to engage in a long battle with you this time (because I'm still tired from the last one), but I do see that you use fairly derogatory language (crude little toy) to describe the Mercier calculator, and claim it to be "nowhere close to accurate." You have your mathematical reasons for stating this, I am certain, but you then claim that you "would have guessed [Kelly's time] to be closer to the level of a man's 1:05." What is your evidence/argument for this equivalent time? What makes your gender comparisons more valid than those of Mercier? For real, I would like to know how you arrive at your time comparisons.

And how are your hefty cats?

Airbear

Airbear,

Wilbur is currently sharpening his teeth on my computer (and testing the sharpness by biting my wrist); Alvin is resting in his makeshift bed on my desk.

Yes, I think it is fair to say that I am using derogatory language to describe the Mercier calculator. The reasons are both empirical and mathematical. The empirical reasons are easy for most people on this site to grasp immediately. For example, as I pointed out, the calculator rates the marathon performances of twelve women ahead of all male marathon performances in history; according to Mercier, Haile G. is the only male among the top thirty or so marathon performers in history, and is the only male to have run any of the top fifty marathon performances of all time.

The mathematical reasons are, to me, perhaps even more striking. For example, because of the way in which data are selected and weighed, the four best performances of each year in each event for both men and women are absolutely irrelevant, except insofar as they help to determine which performance was fifth-best. Performances from the previous year are arbitrarily given 1.33 times the weight of performances from one year earlier, twice as much weight as performances from two years ealier, and four times as much weight as performances from three years earlier. Any performances that are at least five years old are completely excluded. The justification for this weighting system is that more recent performances should be given more weight than earlier performances (which may be true), but the particular weights given to each calendar year are based purely on the desire to use round numbers, so that a theoretical "fifth-best" performance point can be calculated by multiplying the fifth-best performance of the previous year by four, multiplying the fifth-best performance of one year earlier by three, multiplying the fifth-best performance of two years earlier by two, adding the fifth-best performance of three years earlier, and then dividing the whole mess by ten. Because the "updated" Mercier calculator uses only data from 2001 through 2004, the fifth-best performance from the 2004 Olympic year (which happened to be a very slow year for women's marathon times) is given the greatest weight of all. There are a number of other mathematical assumptions in the calculator that do not have any clear justification in any sort of scientific, statistical, or mathematical sense. A reasonably bright high-school student should be able to come up with a better calculator.

I think my description of the Mercier calculator as a "crude little toy" is appropriate, and I don't think that anyone should be on this site promoting it as anything more than that, especially when there are much more advanced and comprehensive tables available.

I said that I would have guessed Kelly's time to be closer to the level of a man's 1:05 (rather than the IAAF's 1:03:37 or 1:03:38), based largely on a very rough estimate of spreads between top male performances and top female performances. Someone else mentioned that a certain age-graded scoring system shows a male equivalent of 1:04:40, which sounds pretty close to what I would have guessed. As I also said, however, I'm not going to second-guess the IAAF tables, which give Kelly's performance the same number of points as they give a male's performance of approximately 1:03:37 or 1:03:38. I suspect that the IAAF tables may reflect a dearth of half-marathon performances by top women on record-quality courses (I think that Paula R.'s fastest half-marathon on a record-quality course is somewhere around 1:07, although she has run under 1:06 on a point-to-point course), so it wouldn't surprise me if there are significant adjustments to the women's half-marathon tables during the next few years. But again, I am not second-quessing the IAAF's current tables based on performances recorded to date, and those tables are vastly superior to the Mercier calculator.

p.s. Wilbur's teeth left me with a puncture wound on my right wrist. The things we do for love . . . .

Boy Wonder wrote:

Her 1:14:56 last summer was the 18th fastest woman's time in the US for 13.1 in 2008.

Can't find such a list. Can you direct me?

https://www.trackandfieldnews.com/lists/display_list.php?list_id=2&sex_id=W&year=2008

not a good journalist! wrote:

https://www.trackandfieldnews.com/lists/display_list.php?list_id=2&sex_id=W&year=2008

Thanks. I tried the usatf and iaaf sites and found nothing. Even google let me down.

I'm writing two stories for tomorrow almost simultaneously, while waiting for one last interview, and of course wasting time on LetsRun, so clarly my research was haphazard.

I appreciate your indulgence.

I have no doubt that Kelly Jaske is a great talent and deserves her success, but still. Its a little embarassing for the sport that such a novice is wearging a USA singlet.

I think this is the part that that off set your congrats to Kelly and running.

offset is one word.

And how so? If I qualified for the US national team two years after taking up the sport I'd think it pretty embarassing for US men's distance running.

She deserves her spot on the team, you can only beat those who show up. Its embarassing that so few did. Again, that is not a criticism of Kelly Jaske, its a reflection of the lack of depth in the sport of women's running in this country. Understand?

It would seem to imply that if the sport were where you thought it should be then Jaske wouldn't be having the same level of success relative to her peers. I wouldn't consider that as anything personal against Jaske, just a preference and hope for a greater good.

We don't need to go through this again. "Crude little toy" is your opinion. The objectivity exhibited by a statistical model using 4-years worth of rank-order, averaged data certainly trumps any "opinion" you have of it. Maybe you forgot, but Paula's time is an outlier that more closely approaches the predicted human limit than Geb's time:

This is despite Africans running the marathon, with none of them even close to Paula. Collectively, the Asians could be said to be better than the Africans.

Bud, again, the IAAF tables use a linear comparison, which you CAN NOT use when comparing a normal population (men) with a non-normal population (women). Mercier appropriately accounts for this by using a rank-order method. IAAF acknowledges biological differences exists between the populations (whatever those differences may be, between or within). Even if depth is improving on the women's side, it doesn't appear to be improving much for the top 200:

No ties to whoever created the Mercier Calculator. I'm just a researcher who uses statistics almost every day (and formerly taught the course).

Miss Ogynist wrote:

Great story about Kelly Jaske on the home page.

The underlying message however is that there is no depth in women's running in this country. You can start in this sport in your 30s and after just a short time serious training you can make the national team.

I have no doubt that Kelly Jaske is a great talent and deserves her success, but still. Its a little embarassing for the sport that such a novice is wearging a USA singlet.

No "g" in wearing! LOL!!!

I don't see an embarassment for the sport to have a "newbie" 8 year runner make a USA team.

one who knows wrote:

No "g" in wearing! LOL!!!

Sure there is, foolio, look again. There is a "g" in "wearing," there just aren't two.

Yes, you're right..Happy now? LOL!!

You win!

Not if you say "warin".

She's running like 120 mpw. THAT is what is amazing.. she has obviously been working VERY hard to run the times that she is. Similar to a few men out there, that have already been mentioned in this thread.

So running for a few years and getting up to 120 mpw + natural talent, pretty good.

And by your argument, I guess we should be embarrassed about US men's distance running because Andy Wheating only took up the sport 2-3 years ago, and hey look, he qualified for the USA Olympic team.