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.
If you haven’t already noticed, the Boston Marathon has reached its entry limit and closed (late Friday or early Saturday, it hardly matters which). This is easily two months earlier than the Marathon has ever closed before.
First, hold the panic. There are still “guaranteed” entries floating around out there which were already counted under the entry limit. Those include charity fund-raising entries (e.g. “raise a few thousand dollars for our charity and you can run”) and club entries (the B.A.A. distributes numbers to area clubs in exchange for volunteers on race day, and of course B.A.A. members have their own entry route). If you’re planning to run through the Tufts President’s Marathon Challenge, for example, you probably still have a good shot at standing in a crowd in Hopkinton in April.
Second, though: there are thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of marathoners with qualifying times who didn’t get their entries in. Most of them haven’t even started training yet; Boston is five months away and four months is an average training cycle for a marathon. There are probably several hundreds of runners who expected to qualify for Boston 2010 in the next few weeks, and now it doesn’t really matter if they do. It used to be the case that a fall qualifying marathon would set you up for Boston in the spring, but if this trend continues qualifiers may have to be run as much as a year in advance.
The question is whether this is something which needs to be addressed or not. If the B.A.A. decides that action needs to be taken for future marathons–and they may not–they have a few options, including expanding the field and tightening the standards. (Ironically, it’s the qualifying standards which were put in place to control the field size which led to Boston becoming as popular as it is today.)
Boston faces constraints unlike any other marathon with regard to its field size. The traditional Hopkinton starting line is relatively narrow (particularly as compared to Chicago and New York City, which start on six- or eight-lane roads) and staging even the current thousands of runners through a small town on a Monday morning is a monumental enterprise which strains the bounds of roads and courtesy. Wave starts, which the B.A.A. has been experimenting with to some success in recent years, ease the congestion but prolong the time the course must be kept open to runners (and, consequently, closed to vehicular traffic).
The other route (not mutually exclusive with expanding the field size) would be tightening the qualifying standards, and that seems likely to be a monumentally unpopular move. Already, times are challenging for many runners; Christopher McDougall, in his recent bestseller Born to Run, referred to qualifying for Boston as “something 99.9 percent of all runners will never do.” Chop off five minutes, or ten minutes, across the board, and the B.A.A. would significantly dent the number of qualified athletes.
But that’s not really what they want to do; the B.A.A. is best off with a standard which is challenging but attainable. Tightening the standards might have to come with a lottery-entry system, not unlike New York’s. Many people are surprised to learn that the New York City Marathon has qualifying standards as well, and they’re actually tougher than Boston’s (starting at 2:55 for men under 40) though they do include a half-marathon standard (1:23 for those same under-40 men).
In New York, however, the standards aren’t for entry; they allow the qualified runner to bypass the entry lottery. Boston might wind up as The Race Where You Have To Qualify Just To Enter The Lottery.
Due to my role for this year’s ING NYC Marathon (about which more later) I decided I needed to be able to extract more information from marathon splits as the marathon is actually happening. I remembered that for previous Boston Marathons, David Monti of Race Results Weekly, doing a similar job to what I’m doing, had a fancy-dan Excel spreadsheet to take splits and project times.
While it’s possible that David added some kind of course factor to his spreadsheet, it seems more likely that he did what I did recently: he made projections based on simple math. For example, they’ve reached ten miles in time X, they have sixteen and two-tenths to run. If they run 16.2 at the pace they ran the last mile, they’ll finish in time Y; if they run it at their average pace for the last ten, they’ll finish in time Z.
I did this for mile splits and for 5km splits, which are the numbers I expect to get in New York. I added some conditional formatting to show me if the leaders were speeding up or slowing down, and if they’re ahead or behind course record pace, using colors. (I suppose if I was really a spreadsheet champion I could use varying shades to indicate how far they were from course record pace.) Adding sheets for the wheelchair athletes will also happen before race day.
I had 5km splits for Robert K. Cheruiyot’s Boston Marathon course-record run handy, so I plugged those in and it worked like a champ.
A sheet which would take a finish time and place and calculate prize money with time bonuses would be pretty cool too, I guess, but it’s not quite as algorithmic–it’s more ahead-of-time data entry. New York does have a deep time bonus structure, and the total prize money package will vary widely depending on how fast the pack runs.
If you have any other ideas of useful and/or interesting on-the-fly calculations, take a look at the sheets and let me know what to add. I did the original work in OpenOffice.org Calc, and exported to Excel, so I haven’t tested the Excel version. (Here’s the original .ods version.) You are, of course, welcome to use these yourself during whatever marathon you’re watching; you can see the appropriate cell to change to set the course records.
I had dinner with the IAAF.org team last night, and we checked out our positions in the media tribune this morning. The stadium is, of course, gorgeous, an imposing classical temple from the outside, a soaring modern bowl on the inside. The royal blue track surface colors the whole venue.
We will be encouraging readers of the IAAF.org competition blog to submit comments and questions. I’ll promote some to the front page and answer them on the fly if things aren’t too busy; I may also answer questions without posting the question itself. I’m not sure yet how quickly I’ll be able to check Twitter.
Interesting news over the last week:
I’ve entered the Media Race, which is on Monday. Rumor has it that Wilson Kipketer is running, and saying he wants to run sub-1:50.
Last fall, I wrote a piece for New England Runner about the changing face of transponder (aka “chip”) timing, where long-dominant ChampionChip was seeing a new wave of competition from lighter, cheaper, and sometimes “disposable” new technology.
Even since publication, however, the chip world has moved on from the state of last fall. I’m told that ChampionChip is nearly out of the picture (you’ll still see them around, as timing companies which own ChampionChip equipment will keep using it) and the disposable chips are dominating. I haven’t heard if the waste issues raised by the disposables have been addressed, nor do I know if the “holy grail” of chip timing, a transponder which can be embedded in the bib number and worn without any extra work from the runner, is any closer.
With that said, here’s where things stood last September. This is as I submitted it, not as it eventually ran, so there may be errors and issues; bear in mind that “this year” means 2008. Hyperlinks, rather than coming up in the text, are all provided at the end of the story.
Peter Gambaccini pointed out Bryan Green’s post about what he calls “The Rotterdam Shift,” laying out what he considers the changes in the sport of marathoning in the last year or two. Green breaks it down into three steps: the shift of track speed into the marathon (Gebrselassie and Tergat leading the charge,) the raising of the competitive stakes by Sammy Wanjiru in Beijing, and finally the generalization of both of those changes in Rotterdam. As Green aptly frames it,
Rotterdam wasn’t just an aberration. It wasn’t just a fluke where Duncan Kibet and James Kwambai ran surprisingly fast world class 2:04:27s. (And let’s not forget Abel Kirui–before Rotterdam, could you imagine a guy running 2:05:04 and NOBODY talking about him?)
As you can imagine from reading my pre-Boston posts, I agree with this viewpoint: the marathon has changed. I don’t think it’s quite as clear as Green suggests, though, just how it has changed, though I agree with him that Tergat and Gebrselassie started the change (I said this a few years ago), and Wanjiru’s run in Beijing was unquestionably a watershed moment. Rotterdam was just the proof, so to speak, the confirmation of a theory.
I think things are still unsettled, though, and in the long run Rotterdam is going to be just the first of many. Bannister said “Aprés moi, le deluge” and Rotterdam is the first stormy squall of the same kind of transition in the marathon. If you want to single out a single race where “everything” changed, I think it has to be Beijing.
Green’s theory matches one I considered myself, but in Boston I discussed this with David Monti of the Race Results Weekly. Among other things, Monti lines up the elite fields for the New York City Marathon, and he knows a little bit about the state of the marathon. Monti’s opinion is that this change isn’t about raw speed. Rather, what Wanjiru did in Beijing was to first set a scorching pace, and then surge off it: he was running a strategic race off a faster pace than anyone ever had before. (Possible exception: former World Record holder Khalid Khannouchi.) The message Wanjiru sent from Beijing was that it would no longer be enough to win by running fast, or win by waiting and surging. If you tried to run away, Wanjiru would stay with you and then break you. If you tried to conserve energy and then break away, Wanjiru would run you off your feet.
Look again at the finish in Rotterdam. Here’s what was remarkable about it: not that there were two Kenyans running sub-2:05 pace. What was remarkable about Rotterdam was that two Kenyans ran sub-2:05 pace and then had to sprint for the line. In Rotterdam. That’s a great collection of speed, sure, and it should have been enough for one of them to break away. It wasn’t. You need a total package now, as I said before: the speed of a Tergat and the strategy of a Tanui.
I would really love to hear what Marty Post thinks about all this.
(I also think this may complicate the move of many Ethiopians to the marathon. Ever since the Gebreselassie era, Ethiopia’s track stars have benefited from an orchestrated team approach to the 10,000m, adapted from the very tactics the Kenyans used to try and beat Geb. That approach doesn’t yet translate to the marathon; I’m curious to see if it ever will, or if another strategy will be used.)
I’ve promised a few times to post the text of the story I wrote for the Boston Marathon program. With the marathon over and all the programs distributed, here’s the text. (Note that I’ve started with the copy I submitted, and may have missed some of the edits made between submission and publication. Also note that the copy deadline, in early March, meant that some of the details here are obsolete; the discussion about the 2012 Trials has progressed since the time of writing.)
Headline: Red, white, & blueprint
Subhead: When it came to staging the Olympic Trials, Boston put on a clinic
In 2008, the organizers of the Boston Marathon added something to the weekend program they had never tried before: another marathon.
The day before 35,000 runners made their way from Hopkinton to Boston, 150 women lined up for the 2008 Olympic Team Trials–Women’s Marathon. The first three finishers would represent the US and run the Olympic Marathon in Beijing in August. The race started in front of the Hynes Convention Center and, after a short loop around Beacon Hill, ran four laps of a 10-km loop which crossed over the Charles River on the Massachusetts Avenue bridge (and featured long segments on Memorial Drive in Cambridge) before returning to Boston. The finish line was the same as that for the traditional Patriots’ Day event.
“I never anticipated what it would be like to come down Boylston Street,” says Blake Russell, “with the church bells ringing and the crowd yelling like thunder.” Russell, who is coached by longtime Boston-area coach Bob Sevene and lived in the area for years before following Sevene to California, finished third in 2:32:40 and went on to place 27th in 2:33:13 in Beijing.
“Everyone was trying to out-yell the person next to them,” says Deena Kastor of Mammoth Lakes, CA, who won a bronze medal in the 2004 Athens Olympic Marathon and won the 2008 Trials in 2:29:35.
“We put those women on a whole different stage,” says Dave McGillivray, race director for both marathons.
(more…)
John Powers of the Boston Globe has a pretty good column summing up the American performance in Boston. I don’t always agree with Powers but he nails this one:
For US marathoning, the challenge is not so much to get faster as to get deeper. While podium-level runners like Hall, Goucher, Deena Kastor, Shalane Flanagan, Meb Keflezighi, and Khalid Khannouchi can run with anybody on the planet, you still can fit most of the American contenders inside an airport courtesy van.
Ryan Hall had as good a chance as anyone to win on Monday, and despite post-race criticism of his tactics (unwarranted, I think), the fact remains that only one runner actually had perfect tactics. That’s the definition of a marathon champion, sometimes: the one runner whose strategy worked. The problem is that Ryan only had one roll of the dice. There were five or six guys in the field with a shot at winning, and one of them was American. What if two of them had been? What if we had two Ryan Halls entered? Maybe the one who actually ran still gets third or fourth, and the hypothetical one makes different bets and wins. Diversification isn’t just a good investment strategy.
Amby Burfoot discusses strategy in his blog, and even though Shira Springer disagrees with his analysis of the wind effect, Amby has a point: negative splits are the way to run Boston until someone proves otherwise. (Obviously they didn’t save Kara Goucher, though.) Here’s my challenge, though: the data is there. I’ve played with analyzing it before (albeit without much success). What questions do we ask in order to get some conclusions from that data?
Everyone has mentioned, in their Boston roundups (including mine) how the women’s winning time was the slowest since 1985.
Everyone mentioned in their previews that no American (male or female) has won the Boston marathon since 1985.
Nobody has mentioned that 1986 was the first year that the Boston Marathon awarded prize money.
I do not think these things are unrelated.
