Data-Centric Approach to Marathon Training
I signed up for the 2020 Chicago Marathon as a joke after watching some friends participate… the joke’s on me, I got in.
With just under 300 days until race-day, I’m starting to think about training. And seeing that I’m in a data science bootcamp at Flatiron, I thought I’d bring some real-world analysis on how to do so into the picture, instead of following one of those ‘couch to marathon in 5 weeks’ guides.
Strava, an online running and cycling tracking app has published results for the 2019 Chicago Marathon, along with week by week training regimen for those that participated — found here. The training weeks are broken down by the runner’s goal times in 30 minute windows.
To figure out the goal time group I’d like to analyze, I first had to come up with a goal for myself — I decided that I’d like to be in the top half of all finishers from 2019. After loading up the results into a chart, it seems that I’ll be targeting a sub-4 hour marathon (9:09/mile).
Starting to look at the data of the competitors that used Strava to track their results, a few things become apparent very quickly - 1) not all runners tracked all of their workouts, and 2) not all runners were able to beat their goal times in the marathon. Using those, I was able to create a filtered set of users that tracked workouts every week for the 12-week period, and had achieved their goal times. This resulted in 4 runners and 100 runs to sift through.
To give myself a fair idea of what my training should look like, I decided the best approach would be to take averages between these 4 warriors on a weekly basis, and look at number of runs, mileage per run, and overall total mileage. In doing so, I was able to create an overview of my new plan, in chart form:
If I were to follow this plan, I would see 39 runs with a total mileage of 349.47 miles over the 12 week period running up to the marathon. These would be split into an average of 3 runs per week, at an average of 15.90 miles per run.
To Follow Up:
- In order to validate this plan, I would like to compare this to other training programs.
- Will I actually follow this plan? TBD
