What is the Fastest Marathon?

How to Measure the Speed of a Marathon.

Image courtesy of https://pixabay.com/en/light-highway-autos-fast-speed-1827442/

TLDR;

• What is the fastest marathon? And, more to the point, what does this mean? How can we measure it fairly?
• We develop a methodology for estimating the speed of a marathon, from the perspective of a typical male and female runner, rather than simply looking at the finish-times of the winners.
• In particular, we describe an approach to normalise finish-times based on participant ages using the Boston Marathon Qualification Standards.
• Based on an analysis of more than 1.2m runners for 9 big-city marathons, we conclude that Boston, Hamburg, and Rotterdam are among the fastest marathons while some of the larger marathons, such as Chicago and New York, are significantly slower.

Introduction

Sometimes the simple answer to the simple question is not enough — or not very interesting — so we have to dig a little bit deeper. That’s what I aim to do in this post, and in fairness I may have gone a little too ‘deep’ but hopefully it is of interest all the same.

The simple question: what is the fastest marathon? In this article try to answer this. We will be using a dataset of more than 1.2 million marathon finish-times during the period 2011–2016.