This is a statement check. If I described myself as an above average high school distance runner what would be the slowest I could run to make that true?
This is a statement check. If I described myself as an above average high school distance runner what would be the slowest I could run to make that true?
:53
2:05
4:47
10:25
17:30 guy
20:45 girl
Sub 4:55/10:40/17:30
nguigi wrote:
This is a statement check. If I described myself as an above average high school distance runner what would be the slowest I could run to make that true?
800m: 2:15-2:20
Mile: Sub 5
5k: 18:00
Average is pretty slow, so I don't know what to say. 5:00 for 1600m? I Our entire JV team couldn't run that fast and there were more of them than there were varsity runners, so maybe slower? My teammate would sometimes win 1600m JV races in 4:55 or thereabouts, and he was running in a race of 20 guys.
Several approaches.
1) Talk to people who know the sport.
2) Find the sample mean and median of varsity runners, then calculate 1, 2 and 3 standard deviations from the mean. Then it depends on how you define "above average" -- perhaps +1 stdev above the mean? That puts you in the 68th percentile (assuming a bell curve), which sounds about right to me, but your mileage may vary.
Analogously, consider the SAT. Would you regard a 600 as above average?
3) The latest version of Daniels' Running Formula uses VDOT levels and associated 1600m times to rate runners on a scale from 1-10, from novice to elite. (Table 5.7, page 98). For an 18 year old male, a 4:55 is the slowest time that qualifies as "Good" with a rating of 6. Good 5 = 5:19. Good 7 = 4:35. Good 8 = 4:18. Elite 9 = 4:03, and Elite 10 = 3:50 (yikes).
4) Times aside, the most important thing of course about running is if you were disciplined, trained intelligently, and had fun.
A quick clarification and correction:
600 SAT referred to one subject (not composite).
Daniels rated a 5:19 1600m as "Intermediate" with a score of 5.
Thanks for the response. I guess I am pretty modest. I was a 4:19/9:31 type. Qualified for the state meet several times. By yours and Daniels settings I'd be 'Good 8'.
I had fun. My teammates and I enjoyed our retired teacher coach but technically speaking he wasn't the best. I should have been able to get more out of my 3200 and I could only run a 1:56 which is where I know I needed work. Had I been a 1:54 type I might have been a 4:10/9:10 guy.
:55
2:08
5:15
18:55
Not sure why people put the 400 times in for distance runners.
800: 2:10
1600: 5:00
3200: 10:30
5K: 17:30
10K: 37:00
How old are you?
If you finished HS in the 90s you might have gotten scholarship money with those times.
Average division 1 college runner, maybe?
Steve Martin wrote:
Not sure why people put the 400 times in for distance runners.
800: 2:10
1600: 5:00
3200: 10:30
5K: 17:30
10K: 37:00
Those times are all over the place. 2:10 for 800m is nowhere near the same as 5:00 for the 1600 or any of those other times. 17:30 for 5k is way more impressive than 37:00 for 10k.
All of them are well above average though.
In New York in 2013, the average 5k xc time was 18:55.
HS Varsity letter
/thread
Honestly, probably 19:00. There are tons of high school kids way over 20:00. I ran a local 5k n Saturday, and an entire high school team showed up. They had one kid in the 19s, and no one else broke 20.
One thing LetsRun loves to do is redefine terms such as "average." Average is not your opinion, it is a factual measure of center, such as arithmetic mean or median. To find this all you have to do is open up the performance list on athletic.net and look. For high school boys in 2014, the center would be about:
5:13 1600
11:40 3200
So if you are above average you are better than that. There is no room for debate on this, it is a fact.
smkoWE9U wrote:
How old are you?
If you finished HS in the 90s you might have gotten scholarship money with those times.
Average division 1 college runner, maybe?
I graduated after the 1990s. My times were top 5-10 in the state. I walked on to a D1 program but only ran 1 year.
HardLoper wrote:
One thing LetsRun loves to do is redefine terms such as "average." Average is not your opinion, it is a factual measure of center, such as arithmetic mean or median. To find this all you have to do is open up the performance list on athletic.net and look. For high school boys in 2014, the center would be about:
5:13 1600
11:40 3200
So if you are above average you are better than that. There is no room for debate on this, it is a fact.
The term "average" is not debatable, but what's included in that average IS. What's meant by "distance runner in high school"? Is it relative all high schoolers? All distance runners? All high schoolers who participated in track or XC? Only those that ran varsity? Only those who took it seriously and didn't join as a social event? Relative your conference, district, state, country? It's not a very straight forward statement. That's the whole point.
I was a crappy sprinter in HS But I could gut out 4;45 or 4:50 for a mile.
The idea of the average 'distance runner' being midpoint negates the fact that the right tail of the bell curve counts folks who are not 'distance runners'. Heck back when I ran XC Huey, Dewey, and Louie from my JV Squad would stop in the back hills and fire up a joint passed it back and forth then skip thru the picnic grounds and trot in to the line.
Median Times for U.S. Marathon Finishers
1980 males 3:32:17
and now
2013 males 4:16:24
Do you honestly think the idea the OP is trying to convey is that he is a 4:15 marathoner?
plus you have to admit even by 1980 the right tail included the centipede runners, the tuxedoed waiter with his tray and the fannypackers
OMMFG
Honolulu finishers over 6 hours
2009 7,788 (38%)
2010 8,155 (40%)
2011 7,621 (40%)
2012 9,342 (41%)
2013 10,032 (45%) 6:07:32 median overall finisher time
http://www.runningusa.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=news.details&ArticleId=332
The title and the thread body are in disagreement.
nguigi wrote:
If I described myself as an above average distance runner in high school, what would you expect my times to be?
Too much ambiguity there. I wouldn't *expect* anything, I'd put a ceiling on your times of about 19:00 for 5k / equivalents. Like you, I'd be reluctant to say "I was pretty good, one of the best in the state," especially in person. (Not that I was--I'd have to say "one of the best in the city".) Feels uncomfortably like bragging.
nguigi wrote:
If I described myself as an above average high school distance runner what would be the slowest I could run to make that true?
This is the question we seem to be discussing--it's more answerable. As others have pointed out, there are two questions to be answered here:
(a) what is the mathematical average time?
(b) what do people typically understand this to mean, when you say you were above average?
Even question (a) has a few variants. The standard intro-statistics POV applies here: do you really want the mean, or some other measure of what it means to be in the middle of things? If there are 9 guys running 19:00, and one guy running 30:00, is the average 20:06? If so, then are you ok with saying that 90% of all guys above-average, Lake Wobegon-style?
Or do you want to talk about the median, which is 19:00 and say that 9 guys are 'average', and one guy is slower than average?
(b) is probably more important, though. The answer is different on a message board than in person--people have a skewed view here of what's fast--and it's also going to change in person depending on who's talking.
If you are talking to someone who looks fast, and they say "above average", you are probably going to think something different than if you are talking to your "fatboy coworker", because the truth is we judge people based on appearances (http://www.letsrun.com/forum/flat_read.php?thread=6087884&page=0).
So part of the answer will realistically depend on: how fast do you look? That'll affect what pops into people's heads when you say "above average".
It'll also depend on the person you're talking to. If you're talking to one of us, we may have something different in mind than the average human does.
Keep in mind that most people may also have an idea that "above average" is vague and ambiguous, and they're probably not going to play intellectual games to try to figure out how fast you could be.