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Graph of 2011 LM finish times
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Sorry that picture is a bit small. A clearer version is here.
Original article from Guardian is here.
It's amazing how much of a classic bell curve there is, if you look at the segment from 2:5x to 5:5x (i.e. for all interval classes where there are at least 1,000 finishers), centred around a mode of around 4:2x I guess. I would've thought it would be more skewed with a long tail.
Misleading comment of the day from the article...
"Ever wondered if you were born in the wrong century? A breakdown of finishing times for last year's London marathon shows that 992 runners finished in under three hours. A time like that 100 years ago would have ranked them among the fastest runners in the world."
Ummm, yeah - so not many people ran marathons 100 years ago. How about comparing the proportion of sub-3 finishers in the race with 25 years ago?
It doesn't even need to be as a proportion PP. For the last few years a time of 2:35 would get you a top 100 finish (this year was 2:36:28, although that does exclude the elite women). In the first London Marathon in 1981 you'd have needed a 2:27 time to make the top 100.
Of course, as a proportion of runners (6000 in 1981 vs 35000) it looks even worse, but that's a bit misleading as the running demographic has shifted hugely, in 1981 almost all were what would be described these days as serious club runners, with fewer 'run one and done' folks further back.