Please post links to results for what you would consider your areas “faster” or “fastest” races. Preferable something in a common distance and fairly flat course, like a 5K or Sprint tri with a 5K. An oly tri might be a good common example as well.
Just trying to figure out if certain areas of the country are faster than others and what an average “fast time” is.
Please be as fair as possible, no known short courses, or “ringer” races like natioanal championshiops etc. Looking for a decent crossection of your community.
Posted a 18.34 5K about 3 weeks ago. it did not feel that fast until I finished and saw my actual time. the entire race I was getting passed by some really fast guys. They were hanging around 15 which was smokin fast.
i ran this race 2 weeks ago and got killed on a 5 mile these guys were way to fast to even try to keep up with, did not even know the race was going to be at that level. http://www.raceberryjam.com/easymen.html
I would suspect that certain areas, Boulder, So Cal some other notable areas would be faster. However my “general” searches for race results yield vary little difference, by percentage, from one area to another.
Off handedly I would suspect southern, warmer states to be faster overall, just for weather reasons.
Seems in one area you might have 10-20 15minute 5K’rs. But you also have 5-6 hundred people in the same race. Put one one 15 minute 5K’r in another areas small race 100 or so and you’re looking at similar percentile.
I have thought about this too, but you need to consider that times at 5,000+ feet can’t be directly compared to times from sea level either. People who are fast are fast no matter where they race but your times will be faster at 0 than 5,000. I don’t know how much you would need to adjust but there is some adjustment needed. Are you looking for overall time of race or just the run?
I have looked before and I have found that the size of the race is a much more useful predictor for how many fast people there will be than the location of the course. Bigger the race the more fast people it attracts.
California 1/2 IM’s get some silly fast times but they are almost all huge in comparison to other parts of the country. Find a comparably sized race in Iowa, PA, or Maine and the times are similar.
You might not like the USAT method of assigning points based on the size of the race but there is a reason they do it that way.
Well looking for links to races both sprint tri’s and regular running races.
Frankly I think comparing something very common like 5k’s would be a better comparison with a larger pool. Sprint distant tri’s distance varies so much that comparing them is a bit falicious. However comparing the run portion of sprints as long as they were all the same distance,5K, would be fairly close.
I did mention OLY tri’s but I think the participation and course profile might make it a difficult comparison.
None the less, any links to what you would consider a fast, flat course that is “well attended” in your area would work. Entire race for the tri’s and run obviously for the run.
Do you think more fast people by percentage or just that there are more fast people because of the larger race. IOW 1% fast for small races and 5% fast for larger races? Or is it just 1 fast guy in a 100 person race and 10 for a 1000 person race?
I think I may agree that the larger races bring in more “fast people” but is this becasue of size or Prize purse? We had a local trail run series here this winter with a small purse attached. Even this small amount seemed to bring fast folks in from all over.
For instance my pace for a 20K fairly difficult trail run, over logs etc. with prize money got me a demoralizing 2nd to last place in my AG in the race. The following day in a larger road race 10K, without prize money, the same pace would have been good enough for 2nd place in my AG. The road race was on order of 4X larger than the trail race.
I will say the above may be a complete anomoly because I rarely place in any local road races.