Racing, Pacing, and Hitting-the-Wall
A Data Analysis of the 2017 Virgin Money London Marathon
TLDR;
- A data analysis of 39,349 race records from the 2017 Virgin Money London Marathon.
- We look at participation and performance as well as pacing and hitting the wall, comparing runners by gender, age, and ability.
Introduction
Yesterday saw the completion of the 37th London Marathon, since the event was first held in 1981. This year the race was won by Daniel Wanjiru and Mary Keitany of Kenya in 02:05:48 and 02:17:01, respectively, and by wheelchair athletes, David Weir (Great Britain) and Manuela Schar (Switzerland) in 01:31:06 and 01:39:5 7, respectively.
It was the usual fantastic spectical of human endeavour and enthusiastic crowd-support. The thrills and spills came in all shapes and sizes as almost 40,000 runners particpated in one of the largest mass-participation sporting events in the world.
In this article we will describe an initial data analysis of the race itself. For this we will focus on non-elite runners only; for convenience we will often refer to these as recreational runners, meaning no disrespect to the many very talented and serious club runners that this includes.
