There were 15 Davids in the race, of which I came in 3rd. So I beat 12 and two beat me, giving a ratio of 12/2, which reduces to 6. Of the non-David men, I beat 167 and lost to 48, giving a ratio of only 3.5.
I would have to do a lot more research to find out first: Is this just a fluke and if I looked at other races this pattern would go away. (My guess is that it is not a fluke--15 is a pretty good number to work with in terms of statistics like this) And second, if it is not a fluke my working hypothesis would be that David is a name which was more popular long-enough ago that the participants as a whole are younger than the average David's age.
Now that I have looked at the data some more, I don't think the age hypothesis holds-up. At first it looked as if the idea was good: All of the Davids are aged between 36 and 60--which seems like the members are not so much old as lacking in any young members of the David club. The slowest five are: 54, 37, 50, 39 and 36; while the fastest five are 42, 45, 45, 39, and 60.
What really made me discount the age hypothesis was that my assumption about the relationship between age and speed is incorrect. I figured younger=faster, but look at this:
48 men in their 30's ran with a median time of 52:06
97 men in their 40's ran with a median time of 48:50
37 men in their 50's ran with a median time of 51:50
*there were only 11 men in their 20's so this didn't seem representative and I didn't include them in this analysis.
The men in their 40's were by far the fastest and largest group, even the men in their 50's were faster than the 30's guys. There were 5 Davids in their 30's--they were the ones dragging down the Davids.
Update: We were a platoon of Davids, not An Army of Davids that's something else.
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5 comments:
Hi,
I checked your result - 44:34 for a 10K and 57th out of 371 runners.
That is a great time!
And you beat most of other Davids.
Congratulations!
I ran my half-marathon on 4/27. Actually, I did a very good time - my personal best for the event. 99 min. 55 sec. for approx. 21.1 km. This was my first time to make it below 100 min. Last year, my time was about 110 min. So, I made 10 min. improvement! Then again, it was so hot last year and I really slowed down at the end of the run.
Keep running!
By the way, do you know the meaning of this "WORD VERIFICATION?"
Thanks!
I was happy about how I did against the other Davids.
Your half-marathon time is really good, you should be able to do a full marathon in less than 3:30. That time is critical since it is the qualifying time for the Boston Marathon. I am thinking of running one in the Fall to try and qualify for 2009 Boston.
The word verification, which I think your blog requires, is a security feature designed to prevent robotic commenting. Humans are really good at pattern recognition and can easily identify letters of the alphabet, computers have a really hard time doing this same thing. The idea is to make it easy for Humans to comment and hard for automated spammers to do so.
I am planning to try a full-length marathon by the year end, but am NOT at all confident about being able to keep up with that pace.
In my life, I've only done two marathons and the last one was 23 years ago (I was still in Tacoma).
Dave, I am enjoying our communication through blogs. Good luck with your trial. I do hope we'll be able to run a marathon together someday. That'll be fun - actuall, even a 10K or just going for a jog with you would be nice.
Spam attack! That's what they are worried about. That is amazing.
This time, I am to spell out "abbusy."
I put your latest time into this calculator which somehow predicts how you would do at different distances. It assumes that you would run at a slower pace for longer races. You should be able to do around 3:28 based on your recent effort.
It would be great to run a marathon together--we are probably around the same speed and it would make the run a lot more interesting. Of course it doesn't have to be a Marathon: If you are ever out this way, it would be a lot of fun to go for a jog.
Thank you for showing me the Runners World site. That is interesting.
I went for a LSD yesterday - this time around 30 K altogheter. Although it was shallow up hill all the way and I took it very esay, it took about 3 hours and I was very beat by the time I was done (I took trains back home).
I do not feel that I am ready for a full-blown marathon, yet. But I am very determined to do one in November, so I will keep working out.
"eeukofu"
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