Perfect Pacing at the London Marathon

How to run like an elite and achieve a personal-best at London.

Courtesy of https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/16/Runners_of_the_2013_London_Marathon_(14).JPG/1280px-Runners_of_the_2013_London_Marathon_(14).JPG

TLDR;

• An analysis of more than 215,000 London Marathon runners during the period 2011–2016;
• How do runners pace the London Marathon? Where are the fastest and slowest sections of the race?
• How does the pacing of elites compare to recreational runners and those running a PB?
• Putting what we learn into practice we create an optimal pacing chart for recreational runners that is tailored for London.

Introduction

With the London Marathon just a few weeks away, participants will be planning their pacing strategy for race-day. Many will look to pacing charts to take some the guesswork out of race-day pacing, but the one-size-fits-all approach of traditional charts limits their usefulness in practice. In this article we describe a new type of pacing chart that is optimised for a particular marathon course — in this case the London Marathon — to provide participants with fine-grained, tailored pacing advice, based on the pacing patterns of the best of the best.

The data for this study is part of a larger dataset of 1.7m race records from more than 60 city marathons, London among them. The London…