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Summary and Analysis.
Men are on average, faster then women in all distances up to the marathon (the longest race I have looked at), however as the distance increases the difference between the genders decreases. If an average man finishes a race at 100% time, then an average women finishes the races in:
However the average winning woman (or 1st placed woman) stays pretty much the same distance behind the average 1st placed man (same as before with the percents, 100% is the 1st mans finishing time). Almost every race that I have looked at is won by a man:
The average pace (minutes per mile) for men and women are shown below for each distance:
Last thing to look at is the make up of a race - what proportion are men or women on average:
Women love a 10k more than any other distance! But not so many like to run marathons... This is all from the races that I have looked at. Another way to compare the genders is world records - the fastest a man or woman has ever run that race distance. The percent differences are:
Note: There are no world records for Parkrun because it is not a race. These numbers are for indication only and are correct for when I wrote this. The differences between the world record holding men and the world record holding women is pretty constant with distance. This is the same as I saw with the average race winning times - just world record holding women are nearer the men with the times. How do races compare? I can plot the finishers finising profile in a chart for each race and adjust the scales so that these charts can be plotted on top of each other to give the following charts: (these are the bits that slows the loading of this page)
These charts are for all the runners in the race and are not spit into genders. I have a good reason for this - to make the web page simpler to update these charts use the race time prediction formulas and so your internet explorer has to calculate the chart as the page loads. Putting 3 sets of charts slows this down too much. So what does this tell me. The Marathon has a wide spread of finishing times, from the peak finishing time () being about 30% of the total race time (total race time here is the difference between winning time and last runners time) - the finishers per minute here are more evenly spread out than say, the 5km ot half marathon race where there is a very sharp rise in the number of finishers with a slow tail off to the last finishers time Apart from me telling you what you can see I will also point out that the Parkrun and 10km race show almost exactly the same finishing profile. Club Runners The second set of data that I have is how club runners compare to non club runners - are runners who train and run with a club faster than those who don't? Same as before percents of the club runners average finishing time at 100%.
This table shows how club runners minutes per miles varies with distance (minutes per mile):
The first club and non club runners tend to come home in the following places:
Are races dominated by club runners? This table shows the percents of club and no club runners at each distance:
Runners who race and declare affiliation to a running club run at a faster average speed than non club runners. This does not mean that joining a running club will make you a faster runner though. Almost all races where club runners are noted in the results, are won by a club runner. Note that these are not very accurate since you do not have to declare affiliation to a club if you run with one and some results do not publish this data - these results are an indication though.
Popular races
Or another way to look at it, there were about 250,000x 10ks, 60,000x 5ks, 154,000x half marathons and 35,500x Marathons run when I looked at how many races there were. Or 1,500,000 miles of 10k, 180,000 miles of 5k, 2,000,000 of half marathon and 930,000 miles of marathon run in the same time period basedon the Runners World Listings. An Average Runner, in an average race, will probably be a man who is not declaring an affiliation to a running club, running a 10km race and finish in about minutes. The race will have been won by a man who trains and runs with a running clubNot sure if that was worth all the effort but there you are. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||