The Runners of the Boston Marathon 2017

A Data Analysis of the 2017 Boston Marathon: Part 1

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TLDR;

• What happened at the Boston Marathon this year? In this article I present an initial analysis based on the data from this year’s event.
• This will be the first in a series of posts looking at the people, performance, pacing, ‘bonking’ and other topics arising out of the 2017 Boston Marathon.
• For now we will focus on the participants of this year’s race — their gender, age, place of origin — comparing their participation numbers and finish-times.
• In the process we will look at how gender and age influence performance and we compare countries and states based on their participation levels and the finish-times of their runners.

Introduction

With the Boston Marathon just completed I thought I would write up a few posts on the data generated by the thousands of runners who completed the punishing course this year.

The dataset for the 2017 Boston Marathon includes 26,263 standard runner race-records; a small fraction of records have been excluded (<1%) because they contained missing timing data or other anomalies. Each remaining race-record includes information such as the gender and age of the runner…