Spoiler: probably true.
I love window shopping for races. I have a list of races I might decide to run someday. One of the races on my list right now is the Tunnel Light Marathon in North Bend, Washington. It’s held in September. The Light at the End of the Tunnel Marathon and Tunnel Vision Marathon are held on the same course in June and August. The course has a couple big draws for me. The scenery looks beautiful, and you get to run through a tunnel long enough that you need a headlamp. They have a gear drop after the tunnel so you can drop off your lamp and pick it up at the finish.
About 400-500 people complete this race, and often over 30 percent of them meet the qualification time for the Boston Marathon. The race websites says that they “care about helping you set a new personal record, and … care about sending you to the Boston Marathon.” they also say it’s the perfect race to set a PR. This race has a point to point course with a net elevation loss of over 2,100 feet. On the Find My Marathon website (which is a great resource for background on marathons), they have a course description that the downhill “is never steep enough to be uncomfortable; you just feel like you’re having a good day.” This is the kind of course that would obviously draw runners looking to run fast. Running fast is fun. I’ve never qualified for Boston, but that sounds fun too. I doubt any marathon course would feel easy, but I wondered if racers did have a good day at this one.
The Tunnel Light Marathon was last held in 2019. The published results have quite a bit of useful information. They’ve posted the runners name, gender, time (based on when they started and based on when the race started), and age. If you click around you can also find the hometown of the runners. I wondered if I could get times for other marathons for the same runners. I found that on the Marathon Guide website you can search for marathon times based on name. Incidentally, this website is also a great resource about marathons in general. I started thinking about ways that I could combine all of this data to draw conclusions about how 2019 Tunnel Light Marathon runners did compared to their other times.
The method I used was to copy each page of the results for the 2019 Tunnel Light Marathon and paste them into a spreadsheet. Then I used each name to search the Marathon Guide website for other marathon times. My goal was to find the fastest time for each runner for each year between 2014 and 2018. I used the ages to filter some results. I did not capture other times from Tunnel Marathons, because I wanted to see how runners did on different courses. When I wasn’t sure if a runner was the same runner based on name and age, or if age wasn’t available in the results, I pried out the hometown from the Tunnel Marathon website and compared that to available results. If the hometown didn’t help, I didn’t save the result. Luckily, a lot of runners of the Tunnel Light Marathon have pretty unique names.
There are a few drawbacks to my approach. If a runner changed their name before the 2019 race, I would not be able to find their previous times. I would also not be able to find results if there was ever a typo in their name, or if they didn’t use the exact same version of their name. I also didn’t save all of the results, only one for each year. I didn’t take into consideration any information about the courses of the other marathons such as the elevation profile or the weather. I decided not too take on that difficulty because I knew that there would always be variables I couldn’t account for such as the weather, if the runner had been injured or was even trying to beat their record. The previous times I did find and capture are just a sampling. Comparing them to the 2019 times will only give a general comparison.
To get better clarity, we would need better data. The best data I can imagine would be for the Race Director to ask runners what their personal record is before the race, and whether they are trying to break their record.
I did not realize how long it would take to search for the times, and if I had I would probably not have tried. Also how I felt about training to run a marathon.
Based on my method, I found that 358 runners of the 2019 Tunnel Light Marathon had a previous marathon time between 2014 and 2018 (that I could find). Of those runners, 242 (or about 68 percent) beat their previous time (or average of their previous times). The average runner (who had a previous time) improved by 3.49 percent.
I found an interesting trend of improvement in time compared to finish order. I plotted finish order on the X axis and improvement in time on the Y. It makes sense that, in general, people who ran fast also ran faster against their own average.
I also took a look at finish order and percent change. I imagine that if you are already fast, improving a few seconds is a larger improvement in terms of percentage (I am not personally fast). The difference in the graphs seem to indicate that front of the pack runners did improve more in percentage than time.
The runner who beat their previous time by the most (both in time and percent) was Todd Brown, who had a previous time of 7:23: and ran 3:58:22 at the Tunnel Light Marathon. Nice job Todd! Of the runners I found with a race time each year for the previous five years, Jun Chea made the biggest improvement over his previous average. His average was 4:01:48, and in 2019 he ran 3:17:59. Wow.
I’m posting the Jupyter Notebook I wrote, and the giant spreadsheet I complied on GitHub. I’m also posting them to Binder. If you aren’t familiar with those, don’t worry! Click on the Binder link, click on the dropdown “cell” and then “run all.” Binder will do all the magic for you. If you ran this race and find that I missed one of your times, feel free to reach out for a correction at comment@hackyourrun.com.