2014 Boston Marathon USA Runners Official Time in Figures

Jialu T
Jialu T
Sep 6, 2018 · 4 min read

Sometimes the universe gives you gifts in the form of data. Last week, I came upon the official times data sets from the Boston Marathon and it was just the catalyst I needed to start this blog. A plot is worth a thousand words, so let’s get right into it.

First, before we look at time, let’s explore the data, specifically the size of this marathon. Everyone knows this is arguably Boston’s most-participated event, but just how many people ran?

There are slightly more female runners than male runners in the 20’s to late 30’s age group, then they even out a bit, and then the balance leans toward more male than female runners in the mid-40’s and above age group. This gap widens as we move to the retirement age groups with 70+ almost entirely dominated by men.

Next, let’s look at each and every runner’s age, time, and sex. Please note that the following plots displaying official times did not include finishing times of known wheelchair participants. It is no doubt challenging to finish a marathon in a wheelchair, but those times were considered outliers and removed prior to data visualization.

Every one of those dots is a person. Immediately, I notice 2 things:

1. Men generally outperform women at every age. You can see this in the blue ‘belly’ of the scatter plot, where the fastest runners (the points toward the bottom) are almost entirely blue.

2. There are plenty of 20-somethings as slow as 80-somethings, but there are no 80-somethings that can keep pace with the faster 20-somethings. In the upper portion of the plot, between 6 and 8 hours, the points make up no distinct pattern between the age of runners and their time once it’s been 6 hours or so. Plenty of people take their time regardless of their age. In contrast, lower-left portion of the plot shows that the fastest runners are between mid-20’s and mid-30’s of age, and finishing times of the fastest in each age steadily rise as age increases.

Are men truly faster than women? At what age group do they break even? Let’s look at some density plots.

The curves above show how the runners’ times are concentrated within an age group. The general message is to see how the peaks and spread vary by sex and change across age groups. In the 18–34 age group, it looks like a lot of men finished around 3 hours, and a lot of women finished a little bit after at around 4 hours. It looks like men and women’s times kind of overlap when we reach the 70+ age group, with women disappearing in the 80+ group.

There are different levels of fast. To me, finishing 26.2 miles at all is a victorious feat. Finishing in 3 hours or less is unimaginable to me. Let’s shine a spotlight on where these fast runners are coming from.

Of all runners who finish in 3 hours, Massachusetts takes the lead, with California following in a close second, and New York a close third. It’s possible that this phenomenon is related to the number of runners coming from those states. It’s worth it to look at the total number of runners by state:

Massachusetts conclusively takes the lead in the total number of runners in the 2014 Boston Marathon. Surprising - yet if you’ve ever heard the thunderous cheers on a Marathon Monday morning - not so surprising.

Did you run in the Boston Marathon and wonder how you stack up? Do you have any guesses for why runners from certain states performed differently from runners from other states? Send me a message!

[Edit 9/8/2018] Thanks to reader Li Chen, I’ve identified and removed data points of wheelchair participants in all figures displaying official times.

Written by

Jialu T

Data is beautiful and I am a fan.

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