Maggie Vessey is running one last tune-up 400 before Worlds - any predictions as to what she will run?

Okay this is just plain stupid to compare the men and women's times. How are you even determining a "baseline" of say, 10%? By that logic, I'll say the baseline is 15% or 20%, you can't just "call" something the baseline and extrapolate off of it. So your whole comparison is just ridiculous.

clearly the word "empiricism" has never entered your vocabulary...

I think it's kind of interesting to look and compare men's and women's records.

But, rather than cite a hypothetical differential of 10% for all events, I'd look at each event and see what the differential was for the world record and, maybe, even the NCAA regional qualifying marks.

The NCAA regional marks interest me because they reflect the 100th best performance in the NCAA system - which contains a very large body of examples. One does have to bear in mind that the age of the athletes comprising the sample is relatively young, say 19-23 on average.

It's odd, but seems to be true, that men convert 400s to 800s more efficiently than women do, but when converting 800s to 1500s both groups seem very similar. Isn't that kind of surprising?

just look wrote:It's odd, but seems to be true, that men convert 400s to 800s more efficiently than women do, but when converting 800s to 1500s both groups seem very similar. Isn't that kind of surprising?

we really don't have enough elite 800 guys/gals ( 1'41.0 - 1'43.5 & 1'53.0 - 1'56.0 ) running regular 400s in same year to really say that compared to 800/1500 which is a common doubling each year & which you can imply some sort of relationship as opposed to the former which it's difficult to

still, i'd throw out 2.3 as a reasonable start as ratio & use +/- 0.10 as a range of error, but in reality, i doubt we will ever get enough quality data points to imply anything much better