St. George Marathon Stats

When I'm not at home being a mommy, I'm at work being a statistician. While my work stats might not be that interesting to most of you, I thought some stats on the 2007 St. George marathon would be. (Data for 2008 were not available in my limited search.) I hope this isn't too boring, too technical, or even too dumbed down. I only analyzed the female stats because, well, this site is called "Marathon Mommies". And for any of the graphs, you should be able to click on them to see them larger.

Here are the summary stats on the age of the runners, the finishing time (in minutes), and pace. We can see that there were 2,229 female runners in 2007. Their average age was 36.6 and median age was 36.0. The youngest runner was 10 ( 10! ) and oldest was 99 ( 99!! ). The average finishing time was 4:24 (264 minutes) and median finish time was 4:16 (256 minutes). Remember, the median finish time is the time such that half the runners finished before that time and half the runners finished after that time. These times give an average pace of 10:06 and a median pace of 9:47. And then, for fun, I added a histogram of the runners' ages. I'm always surprised at how "old" the field is. For some reason, I think runners are always in their 20s. But really, there are about as many twenty-somethings as fifty-somethings!



This is a histogram of all runners' times. For this graph, I grouped all average paces into 30-second intervals (so 7:00-7:29 or 9:30-9:59 minute miles, for example). You can see that most of the runners had average paces between 8:30 to 9:30 (the two tallest bars). The fastest woman finisher had an average pace between 5:30 - 6:00 (far left bar). And 52 women finished with average paces slower than 15-minute-miles (far right bar).


And finally, this scatterplot shows the average ages of those women running in their respective pace groups. It is what you'd expect: the older we get, the slower we get!