Maybe it’s because I don’t follow the message boards, but I’m surprised I haven’t seen more comments about Meb’s forthcoming book with Dick Patrick. I was wondering last week when Patrick was going to write a book, and now I know the answer. Meb has a great story and Patrick will do a good job with it. I’m looking forward to this one.
I wrote an article for the Boston Marathon official program about the marathon’s historically early registration closing, and the options available to the B.A.A. for tinkering with their entry process. Now that the marathon is over and the paying customers have their copies, I’ll archive a copy here.
If you’re watching the Boston Marathon tomorrow, it can be interesting to watch how the race is developing, but it’s not always easy to track whether the pack is picking up, slowing down, or chasing a course record.
As I did for New York, I’ve whipped up a spreadsheet for the Boston men and women which shows the course record pace (even splits, of course, which never happens in Boston) and will show how the pack fiddled with the pace for each stage of the marathon if you fill in the splits as they become available, either announced on the television broadcast or released on the marathon’s web page. I’ve also included the “checkpoint records,” the fastest times at which certain milestones on the course were reached–often, but not always, by an athlete en route to a CR.
You can download the spreadsheet in Excel format or in Open Document Format.
A note about checkpoint records: When Joan Benoit Samuelson ran a course record here in 1983 (2:22:43), splits at 5km intervals were not recorded. Joanie holds most of the checkpoint records for the five-mile intervals, up through 20 miles, and her 5km splits estimated from those five-mile splits are generally faster than the “official” 5km checkpoint records up through 35km, sometimes by as much as two minutes. To keep things simple, this spreadsheet shows the official checkpoint records, not Joanie’s marks.
