An updated formula for marathon-running success
It was a real pleasure to see my marathon time predictor featured in the Guardian a few months back. My algorithm uses data from more than a thousand runners of varying abilities who have logged their training here on Fetcheveryone, to come up with a better prediction of marathon time. You can try it here.
It’s based on my view that the usefulness of the popular formula devised by Peter Riegel in 1977 starts to break down at marathon distance. This may well be because runners are often under-prepared for the rigours of the marathon, but it’s arguably better for morale to smash a realistic goal than to burn out chasing an elusive one.
Here is Riegel’s original formula applied to predicting marathon time from half marathon:
Riegel’s classic formula uses R=1.06, which still provides excellent predictions for most distances even 40 years later – but out of 1,071 marathon runners in our Fetcheveryone sample (all of whom had completed at least five half and five full marathons), less than 5% managed a time that kept up with Riegel’s predictions. The rest fell short.
Here’s another way of looking at the data. If we know a runner’s marathon and half marathon time, we can work out what value of R they achieved. The graph on the left shows the number of runners who fall into each possible value of R. For Riegel’s formula to work for everyone, we all need to be in the 1.06 column (shown in green), but the reality is that we see a wide range of results, and the majority are to the right of 1.06, ie slower than Riegel’s prediction.
It’s based on my view that the usefulness of the popular formula devised by Peter Riegel in 1977 starts to break down at marathon distance. This may well be because runners are often under-prepared for the rigours of the marathon, but it’s arguably better for morale to smash a realistic goal than to burn out chasing an elusive one.
Here is Riegel’s original formula applied to predicting marathon time from half marathon:
Riegel’s classic formula uses R=1.06, which still provides excellent predictions for most distances even 40 years later – but out of 1,071 marathon runners in our Fetcheveryone sample (all of whom had completed at least five half and five full marathons), less than 5% managed a time that kept up with Riegel’s predictions. The rest fell short.
Here’s another way of looking at the data. If we know a runner’s marathon and half marathon time, we can work out what value of R they achieved. The graph on the left shows the number of runners who fall into each possible value of R. For Riegel’s formula to work for everyone, we all need to be in the 1.06 column (shown in green), but the reality is that we see a wide range of results, and the majority are to the right of 1.06, ie slower than Riegel’s prediction.
Source: theguardian
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