Marathon finishing times

Statistical distributions arising from sporting events are a nerdy love of mine, so I found this chart form athlinks particularly interesting. They analysed marathon results from 2012 and found a number of invisible time barriers. You can read their original post on facebook and join their conversation.

 

The distributions show the psychological effects of goal times. The most striking are at 4 hours and 5 hours, with the sharp drops on the hour suggesting that a lot of runners are aiming at just beating that particular time. Indeed, if I ever ran one, I would probably be aiming at 4 hours, or more likely 4 hours 30 minutes, which is a nice round number. In my first half marathon, I beat the 2 hour mark by only 15 seconds, and if it wasn't for a sprint at the in order to pip the 2 hour mark, I wouldn't have made.

What intrigues me is whether runners are really competing to their full potential. If you took away the clock, clearly you wouldn't have these invisible barriers - you'd have a nice smooth curve. But are runners performing better than they ordinarily would, or are they pacing themselves to hit certain times? Let me know what you think.

For a description of what drives the above curve (bar the invisible barriers), see this post I put together on an ocean swim I did - you can't see the clock in an ocean swim so the invisible barriers aren't apparent.