No. Americans Runners Have NOT Never Been Slower

A Critique of Run Repeat’s 2017 Mega Study on Marathons

Earlier this summer, I came across an article originally published in 2017 that used a giant dataset to analyze trends in the American running scene.

In the article — American Runners Have Never Been Slower (Mega Study) — the authors made the general claim that American runners have been slowing down over the past 20 years or so.

So what’s really happening with American marathoners? Photo by kim west on Unsplash

Along with making that broad claim, the authors explored several other “myths” that they claim failed to explain why average times were slowing down.

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One such “myth” was this — that new runners were slower and less well prepared than earlier runners, and that this growth among the slow population was driving the overall change. They argued, instead, that times were slowing down across the board and they attempted to show that the fastest runners in marathons were trending towards slower times.

I was ready to believe the overall statement about average finish times — but this just didn’t smell right. After reading and re-reading the original article, I became less and less convinced.