SDSU Aztec wrote:
Right. Your wife's running experiences can be used to evaluate America's best marathoners. I'm sure your, though, that your wife is a human being and a nice person.
When people train to reach their maximum performance, the slopes of their pace from 10000 to the marathon are very close to exactly parallel. From the marathon to the 100-miler, not so much.
There is a reason that Gaussian Distribution is also known as a Normal Distribution...because most stats fall into it. You are guilty of Selection Bias. Yes 68% of top performers will follow your nice neat line...and you will select those. Then there are those that fall outside that. I would also concede that the variance and standard deviation of this particular Normal Distribution are small.
But no one here is claiming that Walmsley is going to break 2 hours or even run 2:04:00. Just simply folks saying that he might not quite fit the line and his experience with a hilly course makes him a bigger factor than ordinarily might be the case. On a fast, flat course with perfect running weather Walmsley has zero chance. But Atlanta is not flat and fast. This is all before we start discussing tactics. We can all agree that Meb was NOT the fastest runner on Boston in 2014. But he ran away and the fastest runners disregarded him and paid for it. It sounds like many runners here would make that same decision if Walmsley ran away early.
You should not make assumptions on whether my wife is or is not a top performer. As an over 50 female...breaking 3 hours is a rarity.