SunRun 2005 Athlete Statistics

I did this for fun, really. Two things surprised me:

Statistics for the 2005 10km Sun Run derived from publicly-available results by Sporg.com

48,037 athletes registered; 36,248 finished (their times were recorded). Timing is by ChampionChip electronic timing that record each athlete's time from start to finish.


Overall results for all athletes, showing number of athletes who finished in each minute after the start. The notches near the peak may be due to bunching of runners in the different waves - due to congestion, athletes that start at the back of a wave may be unable to run at their natural speed until some distance into the course.


Results for men, smoothed using Bezier function, fitted to two gaussian curves. It is likely that the faster distribution is of athletes who ran the whole course, while the slower distribution is for athletes who walked the whole course. The high "saddle" area is probably due to athletes who walked partway.


Results for women, smoothed using Bezier function and fitted to gaussian curves. The women athletes who ran appear to be 9 minutes slower (mean 63 minutes) than the men (mean 54 minutes), while those who walked went at the same speed as the men (mean 102 minutes)


Results for male athletes grouped by age.


Results for female athletes grouped by age.

The gaussian formula was derived from the standard formula as at e.g. hyperstat online


Andrew Daviel, April 2005