{"id":1731,"date":"2016-04-07T18:12:20","date_gmt":"2016-04-07T23:12:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/unitstep.net\/?p=1731"},"modified":"2016-04-07T18:12:37","modified_gmt":"2016-04-07T23:12:37","slug":"analysis-of-the-2011-2015-boston-marathon-results","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/unitstep.net\/blog\/2016\/04\/07\/analysis-of-the-2011-2015-boston-marathon-results\/","title":{"rendered":"Analysis of the 2011-2015 Boston Marathon results"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I recently analyzed the 2011-2015 Boston Marathon results. You can see the results in this <a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/pchng\/boston-marathon-2011-2015\">GitHub Repo<\/a>, or go straight to the <a href=\"http:\/\/nbviewer.jupyter.org\/github\/pchng\/boston-marathon-2011-2015\/blob\/master\/Boston%20Marathon%202011-2015%20Results%20Analysis.ipynb\">IPython\/Jupyter Notebook<\/a> for the details.<\/p>\n<h2>Boston&#8217;s getting competitive<\/h2>\n<p>One of the more interesting observations is that with the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.baa.org\/races\/boston-marathon\/participant-information\/qualifying\/history-of-qualifying-standards.aspx\">tighter qualifying standards<\/a> the race is much more competitive. Runners have apparently responded by stepping up their game, or perhaps, the race is now limited to faster runners.<\/p>\n<p>The combination of a -5 minute adjustment across the board combined with the &#8220;fastest get in first&#8221; rule has created a much more competitive environment. This can be seen by comparing the distribution of finishing times for the M18-39 age group from 2011 (before the changes) to 2015 (the most recent year). (Both years generally were &#8220;fast&#8221;, as measured the mean and median finishing times)<\/p>\n<p class=\"image\">\n<a href=\"http:\/\/unitstep.net\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/boston-2011.png\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-1737\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/unitstep.net\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/boston-2011-300x87.png\" alt=\"boston-2011\" width=\"300\" height=\"87\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-1737\" srcset=\"https:\/\/unitstep.net\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/boston-2011-300x87.png 300w, https:\/\/unitstep.net\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/boston-2011-768x223.png 768w, https:\/\/unitstep.net\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/boston-2011.png 882w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a>\n<\/p>\n<p class=\"image\">\n<a href=\"http:\/\/unitstep.net\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/boston-2015.png\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-1738\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/unitstep.net\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/boston-2015-300x87.png\" alt=\"boston-2015\" width=\"300\" height=\"87\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-1738\" srcset=\"https:\/\/unitstep.net\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/boston-2015-300x87.png 300w, https:\/\/unitstep.net\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/boston-2015-768x223.png 768w, https:\/\/unitstep.net\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/boston-2015.png 882w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a>\n<\/p>\n<p>You can see that the mode (most frequent bin) has been pushed from sub-3:10 to sub-3:00. This is very impressive for such a large race.<\/p>\n<p>Check out the <a href=\"http:\/\/nbviewer.jupyter.org\/github\/pchng\/boston-marathon-2011-2015\/blob\/master\/Boston%20Marathon%202011-2015%20Results%20Analysis.ipynb\">full results<\/a> for more details!<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I recently analyzed the 2011-2015 Boston Marathon results. You can see the results in this GitHub Repo, or go straight to the IPython\/Jupyter Notebook for the details. Boston&#8217;s getting competitive One of the more interesting observations is that with the tighter qualifying standards the race is much more competitive. Runners have apparently responded by stepping [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[402,137,403,42],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/unitstep.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1731"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/unitstep.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/unitstep.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unitstep.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unitstep.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1731"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/unitstep.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1731\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1741,"href":"https:\/\/unitstep.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1731\/revisions\/1741"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/unitstep.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1731"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unitstep.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1731"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unitstep.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1731"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}