Marathon Pacing Strategy for Boston Qualifying Hopefuls
A deeper dive into the 2024 Chicago Marathon results
Recently, I shared an analysis of the Chicago Marathon. In that analysis, one of the things I noted was that only about 12% of runners managed to run a negative split.
In discussions about the data, another runner pointed out that he was less interested in the general question of whether people ran a negative or positive split and more interested in whether a negative or a (slight) positive split was a better tactic for reaching a goal time.
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More broadly, the split data could be influenced by people who aren’t racing. If you take the first half of the race easy, for one reason or another, it’s a lot easier to negative split than if you were pushing for a specific goal.
To really dig into this question, we’d have to know something about a runner’s intent. Are they trying to push for a goal time — or not?
We can’t know that for certain without surveying the finishers directly — and ideally before the race — about their intentions. But we can approximate a decent sample based on the publicly available results.
