Okay, so by now everyone has read the article about how the “color
run” is killing competitive running or is at the very least indicative of a
general lack of competitiveness among younger runners. I am clearly
oversimplifying the article. This is a bit of a challenge as I felt that the original
article was oversimplified to start with.
Here is the link: Some guy grubling about kids these days...
The article starts our bemoaning that the author placed at
about 15% in the Men’s 50-59 age group and that his AG outperformed the field
such that he finished 11% deep into the field. The knee jerk reaction is to say
that he has made the incredible discovery that men run faster on average than
women. The more concerning issue is that from this limited data he draws the
broad conclusion that the competitiveness of younger runners is gone.
“They're just not very
fast. "There's not as many super-competitive athletes today as when the
baby boomers were in their 20s and 30s," said Ryan Lamppa, spokesman for
Running USA, an industry-funded research group.”
I have heard this before but I still don’t believe it. |
| I think that a 4 minute mile is a good measure of being a "super-competitive" runner. |
What is that I see? The top runners in America aren’t
getting slower? More people are breaking the 4 minute mile than ever? What
about the lack of competitiveness in younger runners?
The 4 minute mile is a measure of the most competitive
runners. Maybe the author of the aforementioned article might argue that he was
not referring to elite runners but rather to the runners at an average weekend
race. Perhaps the elite runners are supposed to be excluded when discussing “super-competitive
athletes”?
What we do see over the past 20 years is a serious explosion
of interest in racing. In 2012 there were 15.5 million race finishers, 44% of
finishers were male. In 1990 there were about 4.75 million race finishers, 75%
of which were male.
If we assume that the distribution in terms of racing speed
across the entire American population is roughly normal it would look something
like this:
What we should expect is that most of the people who fall
into the >2 standard deviations faster than average were already racing 20
years ago. What we see now is that these people have not stopped racing.
American records are getting faster; more people are breaking the 4 minute mile
and there are still epic battles at the USATF New England championship races
around here. What has happened is that more of us from the rest of the
distribution have started racing and there are now >3x more race finishers
than there were in 1990!
The shift from 75% male to 56% female has also helped to
change the average finish time at every distance. It is not a controversial
statement that men are on average faster than women.
So what does all of this mean? To me, this means that runners
are as competitive now as they have ever been if not more. Some of us take the
starting line knowing that we are not that fast yet and don’t care. We race the
people around us and lay everything on the line to beat everyone we can. We
race for PRs and we race to push ourselves. The average finishing time at any
given race is slower but now the probability of the average person taking on
the challenge of a race is much higher.
If you don’t see the competition at the local level then you’re
not looking in the right place. Visit the New Bedford Half Marathon or the Lone
Gull 10km. Look at the USATF New England Grand Prix site and come run one of
these races. If these are not competitive enough for you there are Club
Nationals both at XC and Track to try out.
“Of course, there are
countless super-elite young athletes. And only because the young have no need
to prove they're not old was I able to outrace so many of them last month.
Still, apathetic competition offers little comfort to some aging athletes.”
I'm not a super-elite athlete, but sometimes I will pick a shorter race like a 10k or Half
Marathon to run at MP to practice the pace and practice taking liquids at race
speed. My 6:30 pace might let you beat me and you will think that I am
apathetic but it is not my job to comfort “aging athletes”. It is my goal to run my target races as fast as I possibly can.
In take away; while the author is worried about a lack of
competitiveness from the new runners who take on the challenge of a race even
though they are slower than an experienced senior runner, I will not be
worrying about how many people are behind me. I will be worrying about how many
people are in front of me and what I can do in my training to get faster than
them. But then I’m 30 years old and us kids just aren’t that competitive
anymore.
I read that article as well. He does have a few points worth considering. For instance, the last 5k I went to looked nothing like a track meet. And due to the numbers imbalance the average 20-something definitely does not put in the same effort into training that the average 40-something (who is still racing) probably does. I also know the army had to lower entrance requirements because they could not find enough strong, skinny people to pass the old test. However, I think your way of looking at it is definitely correct. I've heard it said that running is the only sport where everyone competes on the same field at the same time. So, by analogy, one might also say that business is still booming in the major leagues, but in the last few years we've created AA and A league running in the under 35 category - if each league could be a sigma in the bell curve. But since everyone runs the same race we get the strange situation where it is both much easier than before to place in the top 20%, but much harder to place in the top 1%. Lumping everything together like "That Guy" does, including some things that are arguably not even races, really covers up half the story. The number and speed of the elites is definitely increasing as well. I'd actually be really interested in someone doing a real statistical breakdown complete with comparing, say the top 1000 times in the 1950 Boston marathon to the 2013 times. If I were still in town I would say we should get some old newspapers, MATLAB, and some pitchers of beer and write that book.
ReplyDeleteHey James, I agree that is isn't as simple a picture as what I painted. It took me about 4 days from when I first read the article until I got around to posting because I tried to mine coolrunning for all of the 5k data run in 2012 and 1997 to do a comparison but rapidly found out that I was too lazy to pull all the data.
ReplyDeleteSome also say that there is no direct comparison between any two different marathons (even on the same course) because other environmental factors can play such a big part (look at Boston 2011 and Boston 2012).
I'd love to grab some beers and work through all the math about this some time because it is certainly a lot more complicated than I presented it. For example, I don't think there is one bell-curve, it is more of a superposition of smaller curves and those curves then get skewed on the fast end by training. The running population is probably best modeled by a skewed Gaussian modified by a probability function representing the likelyhood of a runner running a race based on his/her speed (using speed as a bit of a proxy for interest in running) and then at any particular race this cross-section of this distribution that shows up is influenced by race size, cost, prize money and all of the other races on that weekend, how they compare on the same factors and when the particular weekend fits into a typical training schedule for the local "big" race like the Boston Marathon, New York Marathon etc. Figuring all of that out would be a lot of fun but more than I can handle right now.