Finishers at American Marathoners are Getting Faster And Slower

Here are the results from analyzing a cross-section of different races

For a couple months now, I’ve been digging into the results from American marathons.

This research project was sparked by an article that I saw shared online. The article claimed that finishers at American marathons had been slowing down in the last two decades, and that they had in fact never been slower.

The part that really bugged me was the claim that this trend was true of runners of all kinds — from the first-timers to the front of the pack.

Something didn’t smell right, so I decided to investigate. And when I couldn’t find the data I needed to answer my question, I went about putting together a large dataset myself.

Not a Medium subscriber? Click here, and I’ll email you a special link to get behind the paywall and read this article.

For more context, and for links to each of the articles in this series, refer back to the original post — A Deep Dive Into Marathon Data.

Since then, I’ve analyzed the results of six of the largest marathons in the United States — and I found that when you compare the results within similar gender and age groups finish times have generally been improving since 2000.

To close out the series, I identified a sample of smaller marathons to look at. And today, we’re going to take…