The invisible 4hr marthon barrier!!!

TRR

A poll carried out by athlinks shows peaks around the main time barriers that people self impose for marathons.

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10152340565655341&set=p.10152340565655341&type=1&theater

definite trend around 4 and 5 hours lesser extent but evident for 3 hours. Not really surprising I suppose but a nice visual.

or as athlinks put it

"The theory was that because of this arbitrary time value, marathoners are more apt to train for and hit specific time goals. When we plotted the data - something even more significant jumped out as you see in the graphs above. It seems that we’re all trying to hit the 4-hour and, to a lesser extent, the 5-hour time limits!"

seamus

Looking at the smaller peaks and troughs between 3 and 4 hours, there also seems to be something of a small grouping every five minutes, e.g. 3:10, 3:15, 3:20, etc which probably indicates that many people aim for a time which is a multiple of five rather than something less memorable and calculable.

I wonder what these graphs would have looked like in the time before GPS watches and pacers.

TRR

seamus wrote: »

I wonder what these graphs would have looked like in the time before GPS watches and pacers.

Wondered the exact same thing myself. I guess the peaks wouldn't be as obvious.

It's obvious a lot of people train for a specific time and either marginally miss out or hit it, I've had a few artificial time barriers in my own running to date and IMO the best way to make sure you go under them is to train for a time that is at least 10 minutes under your goal time. Worst case scenario you'll hit your time, best case you'll blitz it.

robinph

The 5 minute peaks seem to only be in the 15 minutes just over the 3hr and 3:30 marks, and one at 2:55. The rest of it looks to be pretty random squiggly line except for a 5:15 peak as well. Everyone cares about breaking the 30 minute milestones, once you get into sub 4hours people get more anal about every 5 minutes.

Interesting graph to see though.

pistol_75

Very interesting info. Something I noticed a lot this year with people on the novices and improvers thread here. They all seemed to have a goal time to the 1/4 of an hour i.e. sub 4, 4:15, 4:30. Also when they were talking about revising their goal it was revised up or down by 15 minutes. That didn't make sense to me as it is a pretty drastic increase or reduction in pace per mile over the course of a mile.

Not sure if it was to do with pacers or whatever caused the big changes. A lot of the time I think people analyze it too much instead of just getting out and running their own race and see where it takes them.

KentuckyPete

Interesting that the curve for women is almost a normal distribution while the curve for men is skewed to the left (faster times). Plenty of material for a PhD in that one I'd say

RayCun

KentuckyPete wrote: »

Interesting that the curve for women is almost a normal distribution while the curve for men is skewed to the left (faster times). Plenty of material for a PhD in that one I'd say

I bet if you added DNFs (on the right of the x-axis, say), the men's spike would be bigger than the women's.