Jamin's psychologist wrote:
Ultra and triathlon, really? wrote:
Article also states that ultras and triathlons are tougher?
Most letsrunners could WIN an ultra off zero training, even more so for triathlon
Jamin's psychologist wrote:
Ultra and triathlon, really? wrote:
Article also states that ultras and triathlons are tougher?
Most letsrunners could WIN an ultra off zero training, even more so for triathlon
One thing that irks me about this article is the sentence: "At RunRepeat.com, we analysed more than 34 million marathon results over a period of 20 years and found that runners in the United States are gradually becoming slower." He could have simply written "[...] and found that the average finishing time had decreased over time" but instead extrapolated his results beyond just the marathon (or rather, the marathons that were included in his analysis). Saying that "runners in the United States are gradually becoming slower" also paints with a wide brush; "runners in the United States" is a group that includes both hobby joggers and elite athletes and everyone in between.
I'd be interested in seeing what the average time is for runners that run 4 or more marathons a year is, and whether there is a trend there as you look across the years (the general vibe I get from the "manic"-type runner is that the primary focus is more on finishing as many races as you can, not finishing as fast as you can). Also I'd be interested in seeing if you took the top 100 times run by Americans in any year and calculated the average of those 100 times, what does that look like when plotted across the years?
I think all of this is right plus the fact that there are so many marathons out there. Maybe the 100th place finisher at Chicago is slower but maybe some folks are choosing regional races to run since there are tons of options.
Something Maybe wrote:
Stats1000 wrote:
Something is weird about the tables in the article. How come the average running time of the top 1000 is *slower* than the average of the top 2000 (for example for 2002, 2009, 2012)?
If they sample all marathons, then the number with more than 1000 but less than 2000 finishers might skew the average of the top 1000 to be slower than the top 2000.
The link below is an article from the study's author's website which gives some additional details on how the statistics were compiled. Of note it says they used races with 2000 participants or more. That's still questionable when they quote statistics up to the first 5000, but if it's done correctly, it's not clear how that would cause the 2000 faster than the 1000 years. In any case, there's clearly a problem with their analysis.
https://runrepeat.com/american-runners-have-never-been-slower-mega-studyThe rejection threshold for "walking a race" (e.g. 8 hours for a marathon) seems high which puts on the unreliable statistical tail. I know people who have walked marathons and they've finished faster than 8 hours.
Seems to forget the exodus to track. Check 5000 and 10000 depth now vs. then and get back to me.
What do you mean people are getting slower? Look at these results from the Disney "Dopey Challenge" Probably 80% of finishers are over 5 hours.
https://www.trackshackresults.com/disneysports/results/wdw/wdw18/Dopey%20Full%20Results.pdf
(I don't have a good .pdf to excel converter to sort so this 80% is an estimate)
Jamin's psychologist wrote:
Ultra and triathlon, really? wrote:
Article also states that ultras and triathlons are tougher?
Most letsrunners could finish an ultra off zero training, even more so for triathlon
Woah - finish?! How crazy!
"We included only races with an average number of finishers greater than 2,000 (for all four distances)."
So that means for certain years there would be some races which don't have 2000 finishers.
Also I think instead of looking at 1000th or 2000th finishers across these races look at median and other percentile positions to control for varied race sizes.
Wouldn't time of the Xth percentile be more statistically solid? The time of the 1,000th runner with 1,000 total participants is the last placed individual. The time of the 1,000th runner in a race with 10,000 runners is in the top 10%. How can these two times be lumped together as simply a trend in 1,000th placers?
This is not ‘research’ and the authors lack a basic grasp of introductory statistics when they attempt to correlate national health parameters with marathon times; truly sad.
It surely has nothing to do with the hordes of obese non athletes that take 6 hours to walk the course en route to a medal!!
Triathlon is definitely not stealing speedsters. When was this article we? Triathlon participation has been on a huge decline plastic few years, with an ever increasing amount of these people being just "completitors". Worse yet, many race dont have participants finishing the whole race... They just only ,do 2 parts, such as swim bike.
People have so many more options now to compete.
Cycling, tri, cyclocross, etc. it's easy now to find a niche. Also I think making otq' time 2:18 doesn't help. College kids give up before they start... if it was 2:22-2:23 again I bet numbers of sub 2:30 would double.
This is one blind statistician. Don't look at the data. THINK.
The AVERAGE is getting slower because MORE SLOWER RUNNERS ARE RUNNING. The sport is growing, but it's growing among hobby joggers, not elites and sub-elites. Every running company - think what the Brooks CEO just said - knows this.
If you run a NYRR 10K, you can be a 40 min 10K runner and be in the second corral. We're not getting slower or fatter. More people are picking up running and those people are primarily focused on finishing, not running fast.
WDC Runner wrote:
Beyond legitimate comments above on the possible reasons for this trend, the data needs scrutiny. The chart provided summarizes the 34 million data points they collected. However, there are such outliers that the data is suspicious to me:
How can the average 100th place finishing time vary so much:
2006 3:11
2007 2:28
2008 2:53
In 2007 how can the average 1000th place time be 3:20 but the average 2000th place time be 3:22.
In 4 of the 17 years of data, the average 2000th place finishing time was FASTER than the average 1000th place finishing time. Maybe I’m not thinking straight today but how can that happen?
Not every marathon has a 2000th place finisher. I would imagine that in a marathon with only 1000 runners, the 1000th place finisher is going to be a *lot* slower than the 1000th place finisher in a marathon with 10,000 runners. More small marathons (around 1000 entries) will give you a slower average 1000th place finishing time and not change the 2000th place. More big marathons will probably give you a faster 1000th place finishing time and, depending on size, could either raise or lower the 2000th place time.
Imagine there are two marathons in the US - ones with 1000 participants and ones with 10,000 participants. Assume that the range of times is the same - the fastest runner takes 2 hours (to make the math easier) and the slowest takes 6 hours. The 1000th finisher at the small race finishes in 6 hours. In the big race the 1000th finisher takes about 2:24 for an average finish time of 4:12. The 2000th finisher takes about 2:48 in the big race and there isn't one in the slow race, so on average the 2000th finisher finishes over an hour ahead of the 1000th place finisher.
Conclusion: Compute worthless numbers and you end up with worthless results.
If you want to see if people are getting slower I'd probably make a list of every time posted by a US runner in every marathon, order it from slowest to fastest, and then look at the 100th, 1000th, 10000th, etc. times. That seems to me as if it should be meaningful.
This study? Unless they did some clever weighting behind the scenes, it looks like crap to me.
Because the run more tactical races and go for the win instead of time.
KudzuRunner wrote:
Very interesting article, backed up by research. I don't think LR's will be surprised.
https://aeon.co/ideas/why-marathon-runners-in-the-united-states-are-getting-slower
A few things to note:
1.) The data from 2007 is either a magnificent outlier or this "statistician" got lazy and made a mistake. 2:28 for 100th place as the average? Pass
2.) This entire section is pure laziness: " We compared the national average rates of obesity, diabetes and annual medical expenditure with the average finish times. This time, the results showed a clear correlation that is 99 per cent significant and replicable in various circumstances. "
- as one poster has so eloquently stated, "Compute worthless numbers and you end up with worthless results."
3.) Check out this interview he did with "The Clymb."
http://blog.theclymb.com/interviews/meet-the-man-behind-the-largest-ever-conducted-study-on-marathons/If you don't want to read, I'll highlight a very telling section:
Q: "What is your personal interest and/or history with running?"
A: "Being 16 years old I enjoyed running. I jumped the fence to the stadium to train my intervals. I rarely participated in races; I loved the process, not the goal. What I enjoyed so much was improving. The results were measurable! The reason I didn’t become a world champion was, as is the case with many other young hopes, an injury. "
This guy has a 5K PR of 15:58. Yes, it was that gosh darn injury that stopped you from beating Edris and Farah.
It seems like he had a conclusion and massaged the data to fit that conclusion.