Track Graph of the Week

Kipchoge, McLaughlin, Amusan, Duplantis.

One of those is not like the others.

A few suggestions though these would probably be career related rather than single year:

1) Change in performance after switching coaches

2) Indoor vs outdoor performance

3) Consistency regardless of conditions (the Yuki Kawauchi factor)

4) In the decathlon etc. is it better to be consistent across all disciplines or dominate a few

This is a great idea. I'll look forward to it every week.

How a bout a graph of the women's records as a percentage of the men's.

This week's graph pertains to the Houston Half Marathon which is one of the premier half marathons in the US. Emily Sisson was able to break the AR this past Sunday in Houston and it was also the site of Ryan Hall's 59:43 AR in 2007. In fact, Houston has been the site of more fast half marathon times among Americans than any other city.

Thanks for the good suggestions of future graphs. I plan on looking into some of those ideas over the next few weeks.

Today I decided to make a graph that was suggested earlier in this thread by Raddison. Decathlon is always an intriguing event due to its competitor's wide array of skill sets. Some decathlete's best events are the sprints, while others are jumping specialists or excel in the throws. This makes for very compelling competition as every centimeter and millisecond matters, even in a decathlete's worst event.

I decided to graph the range of points scored between each decathlete's highest and lowest scoring event. It is shown by the blue bars in the graph below. The average point total across all 10 events is marked by the yellow diamond. I included all world championship decathletes from 2019 and 2022 who scored points for all 10 events. The data comes from worldathletics.org. I noticed their doesn't seem to be a correlation between the range of points and average point total. What did intrigue me with this graph was that a high point total in a single event appeared to be a contributing factor to a high average score. This seems to indicate that you need to be near world class in at least one of the 10 events to compete for a medal.

I hope you all enjoy this graph. Let me know what you think. Thanks again to Raddison for the idea and let me know what other graphs you'd like to see!

There have probably been 100+ Woody Kincaid threads in the past week so he was the obvious choice to be the centerpiece of this week's graph. Kincaid's 12:51 indoor AR was stunning but what was more stunning to me was that he was trailing Joe Klecker so late in the race yet he was still able to win. I decided to gather data on the margin of victory over second place for winners of sub 12:55 5k races, both indoors and outdoors. I specifically wanted to highlight come from behind wins so I checked either splits or video and only included the data of winners who were trailing with 400m to go. Unfortunately, I decided to exclude all races before 2011 since I couldn't find 400m splits or video for the majority of races from the time period. I got my data from alltime-athletics.com, diamondleague.com and Youtube.

Do you think Kincaid's kick is truly among the best we've seen in the past decade? Let me know what you think. And always feel free to post other suggestions for future graphs.

This is my favorite graph yet. Nice work!

More, please! Time at Monaco/BU vs. other season bests? I don't know, but these graphs are great.

Nice work, dmitlof1. Thanks for this.

3 or more Wanamaker Mile wins

Bernard Lagat (8)

Eamonn Coghlan (7)

Glenn Cunningham (6)

Marcus O'Sullivan (5)

Don Gehrmann (4)

Ron Delany (4)

Ray Conger (3)

Gilbert Dodds (3)

Marty Liquori (3)

Matthew Centrowitz (3)

Other significant past winners

James J. Connolly: Inaugural champion (1926)

Josy Barthel: First Wanamaker Mile champion from outside the US, First Wanamaker Mile champion to also win an Olympic 1500m title (1954)

Gunnar Nielsen: First Wanamaker Mile champion to also set an outdoor 1500m WR (1955)

Kip Keino: First Wanamaker Mile champion from Africa (1966)

Tony Waldrop: First athlete under 4 minutes in the Wanamaker Mile (1974)

Noureddine Morceli: First and only Wanamaker Mile champion to also win an Olympic 1500m title and set an outdoor 1500m WR (1991,1993)

Yomif Kejelcha: Set current MR with a time of 3:48.46 (2019)

Ollie Hoare: Reigning champion, Only past winner in this year's field

The Wanamaker Mile has attracted many legends through it's illustrious history. Who do you think will win this year's edition? Can Hoare repeat or will I have to add a new name to my graph? Irish athletes have had success in the past so perhaps Luke McCann can pull off the upset. I'm excited to see what unfolds this Saturday!

The highlights of last Saturday's Millrose Games were the Men's Wanamaker Mile and the Women's 3000m. Since last week my graph pertained to the mile, I'll focus on the Women's 3000m today. A lot of the attention has been paid to Alicia Monson's AR and Katelyn Touhy's NCAA record (rightfully so) but I was most surprised by the performance of Whittni Morgan. She moved to 5th on the US indoor all time list with a time of 8:30.13. Her rank of 19th and 18th on the indoor 1500m and 5000m all time lists show that she is among the best indoor runners in the US and deserves more praise for her great Millrose performance. Today's data comes from worldathletics.org.

Nice way to visualize it. Makes it pretty clear that a fast 5000 would be a good goal for Monson this year.

Last weekend, numerous national champions were crowned at the USA Indoor Championships. Across the 28 events, there were 26 champions since Anna Hall and Sam Prakel each won 2 events. 11 of those 26 won their first national championship and they are the focus of today's graph. The data comes from results.usatf.org and worldathletics.org.

Some of you may be surprised that I neglected to make a graph on the recent indoor WRs but don't worry I have one in the works that will appease all the Girma/Crouser/Bol fans.

On February 8th, Miltiadis Tentoglou jumped 8.40m in the long jump in Torun. He was subsequently disqualified for wearing distance spikes that are illegal to wear in the jumps. On February 15th, Tentoglou posted on Instagram about the situation and in his caption he wrote one of my favorite athletics quotes of the year: "I don't care about an 8.40 jump. I can jump it whenever the #$%& I want." That same day he jumped 8.41m in legal spikes in Lieven to prove his point. His quote is borderline cocky, but as Olympic Champion he's certainly earned the right to talk big. I decided to look at the data from worldathletics.org and see just how frequently Tentoglou truly jumps 8.40m+.

I've been on a 3 week hiatus, so today I have 3 related graphs to make up for my absence. One of the biggest recent developments in indoor track has been the flurry of fast times in Boston, MA. Today's graphs try to examine exactly how much faster athletes are running in Boston vs on other tracks. I took all indoor times in the men's and women's mile, 3000m, and 5000m for the 2021-2023 seasons by Americans from worldathletics.org. I then only retained instances of athletes who had raced both in Boston and not in Boston in a given season. This left a total of 22 data points for the mile, 9 data points for the 3000m and 39 data points for the 5000m. I then sorted them by how much faster they were in Boston vs elsewhere and graphed them. I then added 3 vertical lines to each graph. The solid black line is at 0 seconds difference so points to the right of the line were faster in Boston and points to the left were faster elsewhere. The red and blue dashed lines are at the average difference for the women and men respectively.

I typically like to keep my graphs based on fairly recent events but currently there is a down period until the Diamond League season begins in May. So in the meantime, send me some ideas of what you'd like to see until then. Thanks

Thanks, this is fantastic!

One thing I'd really like to see is the actual distribution of race times at various levels, but especially high school/NCAA. Statistically speaking, what is a fast mile?

Sha'Carri Richardson made headlines with her 10.57 wind aided 100m clocking from last Saturday. Many Letsrun posters have dismissed this performance by saying that she doesn't run that fast when it matters in championship races. So for today's graph I've decided to take a look at the championship resumes of Richardson's peers on the women's 100m all time list. I included the 12 athletes who have run wind legal 10.75 or faster in the graph.