Profit sharing in road races

As a races grow in popularity, so does the cost of entering. Chip timing, online processing fees between 4 to 11 dollars add to an already inflated ($40-350) race price. Although it costs money to host a race, one can guess that hosting a race if done efficiently can be a source of revenue.

Some of this money goes to road closures, to police, to race timing services, hosting expos, and pre and post-race entertainment. Some of this money also is allocated to prize money for the winners of the race. What correlation is there, if any, between the cost of races, the number of entrants, and the prize money given to the winners? I decided see exactly how much of this money goes to the the racers.

51 things to keep in mind when you run

Runners like to measure themselves. Be it miles run, calories burned, weight gained or lost, pace, heart rate there a lot to choose from. And it seems new, "important" numbers pop up as fast as we can write them down, such as lactate thresholds or muscle fibre type.  Some runners log their miles while others track their minutes. In addition, should one simultaneously track their resting and maximum heart rate? What about pace, calories burned, or bodyweight? How to choose? It's clear enough the dedicated athlete maximizes his or her information, but even the most data-oriented individuals can fall under the weight of numbers.

Compiling these metrics is not intended to clarify or rank them. What I'm hoping in gathering as many as I can is illuminating just what people consider, and is available, to measure. And it is rare to find comprehensives lists of these metrics. Therefore my main goal was to find 51 "measurable" things related to running that have been used, or recommended, by a credible source.

I present these findings in no particular order of importance, but accompanied with a brief commentary. I expect most of these metrics are familiar to almost everyone, some that only known the seasoned veterans, and a few that are relatively unknown. I've broken the list into 8 categories: Milage, Body, Shoes, Rest, Diet, Strength, Workouts, and Races.

One final warning: When including new metrics in one's melting pot pick and choose carefully. Monitoring all these variables at once is not a healthy way to train!

Quick post to prove I'm not dead

Just like everyone else's life there's lots of other things going on, but it seems to have delayed writing about anything.

Irony abounds: I got overwhelmed with things to say so I stopped writing. Usually I don't know what I want to talk about until I start writing. But as storytellers go I'm not the best, so it's hard to give a good tale about the past. Instead, here's the grocery list for May.

April: Ran a trail race, twisted ankle and got mad at myself for doing so. Stupid body.

Thee weeks later (May) I got well enough to run Bluenose half marathon. Came in second in a time of 1:11 to John Kuto, who ran in 1:09. Halifax has a lot of secretly great runners

Week after that ran two legs of the Cabot Trail relay with the Black Lungs team, a team from Toronto that I was invited to join in. (NB: The name refers to coal miners but people often think it's a group of ex-smokers). Came second in leg 2, then won leg 15. In one solid weekend there was some good male bonding to be had.

Week after that went to a friends' wedding in London, Ontario. It was effectively a class reunion of McGill Alumni, which was awesome. Open bar also great, as was seeing two longtime friends getting married.

That brings me to the present. I've also been working on a first draft of a paper for my SPARTAN project at Dalhousie. Helping guide other people's projects as well as going some of my own. During May I created the new title heading (as you'll see if you click on the link). It's a pretty sweet full-time job.

Last week I rolled the same ankle I did in April. I got mad and started pool running. Pool running is awesome, however, and after 5 days I'm almost back to normal. These guys I was running with (when I rolled the ankle) are fast guys but don't have an official club. Like I said, there's hidden talent here.

So yeah, randomly busy May/June period. I also got it into my head to maybe run the Chicago Marathon in October, health and seat sales permitting. Black Lungs people will be there, as will others. But first I must run a sub 1:11 to make the qualifying standard for a late entry (general entry is sold out). Johnny Miles is next week. Could try that one.

Also added a twitter feed to the sidebar of the site. Let's see if I can muster 140 characters now and then.

 I had this personal mandate to write when I felt like I had something worth posting. I'll try to ignore that mandate as often as possible.

Roger and me

Roger Ebert, Chicago film critic extraordinaire, died on April 4th 2013. My memories of Ebert are entirely derived through his writings. I have never met Roger in person.

I first began reading Ebert's reviews when Siskel died. That was back in 1999 and I was still a teenager watching awful movies like The Animal or The Waterboy (sadly admit I witnessed both in theatres). I had been watching the Siskel and Ebert night at the movies up until then, and it was entertaining stuff. They bickered but you knew there was a real opinion behind every comment. Every week they introduced countless new films. It would have been impossible not to tear down the walls and open up. Keeping in mind they were not professional talkers, rather professional writers, and could not BS their way through every review. I have a good BS detector and never once did alarms sound with these two. My own "to thine own self be true"-type honesty had yet to mature, and so as I watched their recommendations of good movies week after week I still would go with friends and catch the latest Sandler flick. But shortly after Siskel died, my curiosity got the best of me and wondered what Ebert looked like in writing. Back then his website was nonexistent. The domain rogerebert.com had yet to be registered (as far as I know). Thankfully the Chicago Sun Times had even then an electronic database of his reviews.

Drugs of the mind and body

I have an open-ended question to pose: Is there any moral difference between manipulating our mind versus our body with drugs? After some thought I decided within the world of work (jobs & offices), physical drugs are normal and mental drugs are everyone's dirty secret. By contrast in the world of sport it is the opposite: physical drugs are demonized and secretive while mentally altered states are the norm (or at worst redundant).

For some context on what constitutes "normal" or acceptable in Western society's drug use, here is the United States' top selling drugs of 2012:

Swimming vs running trends for four levels of sport

NB: This post is a redux of a previous discussion on the same topic. The difference this time is more reasoning behind the stats and me asking the opinions of other people. Therefore the updated results address suggestions and challenges from a few people, including Alex Hutchinson himself. I feel the questions if not satisfactorily answered are at least out in the open. The good news is that my "discovery" appears to have survived the most obvious challenges and the conclusions should now be more robust.

I wanted to find out what sort of trends, if any, appeared when taking the ratios between the top (i.e. fastest) men's and top women's ratio of times in two sports: swimming and running. I define a ratio as the following

Ratio = [Time for a woman to complete distance X]/[Time for a man to complete distance X]

For example, if considering the 10,000 m track event and a woman's time is 32 minutes while a man's is 29 flat, their time ratio is 32:00/29:00 = 1.10. Let's then take another fictitious ratio of 1500m times as 4:20(female)/3:59(male) = 1.08.

Why go to the trouble taking these ratios? To skip ahead, what I've found is that as distance X increases, this ratio goes up for running and down for swimming. Using the same two examples as above, the fictitious ratio goes up from 1.08 to 1.10 as I increase X from 1.5 km to 10km. Here my argument holds because I invented the numbers. All numbers from this point onward will be quite real. Below is an illustration of what I will soon show with actual data:

Simple enough to do these calculations, however it turned out to be more difficult arguing there was any inherent meaning the final results. Considering the above example yet again, I what have I actually shown? Another faster male might run the 1500m in 3:50, so the new ratio becomes 1.13 and my argument now falls to pieces. Or the female times are artificially slow due to low participation. Clearly I am going to need a lot of evidence to support such a sweeping generalization as "women improve with respect to men in swimming but worsen for running". From a (admittedly cursory) check with the available literature and a couple of correspondences, I have not seen these two trends discussed together. Even if the swimming/running down/up trend is well-known, it was a good exercise working with different lines of reasoning. And I imagine at least some of the data here could somehow be novel.

Swimming vs running: men vs women

In a older post, I took a ratio between men and women's world records in running for various distances. Top women run slower than top men, that much is clear, but taking this ratio I was looking for a pattern if we merge all the distances from 100 meters to 217 kilometres, obtained here, here, and here. Then I plotted the result as a log-graph. The x-axis isn't pretty, but I have an aversion to base-10 notation (I can't explain why).

Regardless of how I plotted the numbers, three orders of magnitude of data ought to reveal something. What you can see below is, with the single exception of the 100 km road race record is that as distances get longer the ratios increase. In other words women, compared to men, get slower for ultra-long races. Starting at the 60m dash Maurice Greene ran a 6.39 versus Irina Privalova's 6.92 for a ratio of 6.92/6.39 = 1.08, and ending with the 217 km Badwater Ultra that Valmir Nunes ran in 22h 51 min compared with Jamie Donaldson's 26:16 effort for a ratio of 1.15. Averaging the ratios for all the distances leads to an "expected" value of 1.12. To put that in perspective for middle distance people, we could say an 8:54-minute male 3000 meter runner is equivalent to a 10-minute female (which is why I'm annoyed at the women when 10 guys are running that fast and no girls, i.e. here). Consider that a male 4 minute miler is the same as a 4:30 female.

I imagine not many realize women are closer to men's performances for the shorter distances than for longer. Most semi-knowledgable runners will point out how close Paula Radcliffe's time is to top men in the marathon, but fail to realize the difference is even less in shorter distances (and the gap widens as you go farther). On explanation could be that short-distance women are more prone to drug enhancements.  Another is that men are more attracted to ultras leaving the women with a comparatively weaker field. Consider the field of the 2012 North Face Endurance Challenge 50 miler with 167 men vs 27 women. I find similar trends in other ultras. Very fast ultra women like Ann Trason don't change this general trend.

UPDATE: Curious, I decided to take male/female ratios of the CIS standards for indoor track and field. (If any non-Canadians are reading this, a university student running a "CIS standard time" at some point in the indoor season qualifies them automatically for the Canadian championships. Otherwise you must medal at the provincials). CIS standards are, sort of by definition, a time expected to be achievable by half a dozen or so Canadians. It is a good yard stick for the overall talent of each distance. Distances span 60m to 3000m (And I included the 4x800m relay to create a pseudo-3200m race). Here are the women/men ratios:

For all distances the ratios are well above the world-class averages. And it gets much worse with longer distances; the 3k ratio is 1.18. The average for all seven distances is 1.16. Keep in also mind that Canadian men are not themselves running incredibly fast times; the National men's 3000m can be won in the low 8 minute range, and the CIS record of 7:54 has stood for 30 years. This is not yet world competitive. The implications are clear: University Canadian women show a comparatively poor performance. I do not mean to pick on anyone, only point out an objective fact: Canadian university women are not running well. This is a fair statement as I'm comparing apples to apples. I also wrote about this earlier regarding the Canadian Olympic standards for men and women. These latter cutoffs hover around the 1.14 ratio mark, still lower than the CIS (i.e. so require the women to run faster).

The explanation for the slow women's CIS standards is not obvious. Female university enrolment is higher than the men's (most universities are at least 60% women), and women's track & field participation is at least as large as the men's (at McGill it was much larger). Also women's sports scholarships are not in short supply. Why are *specifically canadian* females falling short? At least several Canadian women should, for instance, be able to run 9:17 for the 3k or 4:16 for the 1500m (instead of 9:47 and 4:28). Megan Brown is the only Canadian who's close to these two marks.

Random shout-out to all: I would enjoy a coach's perspective on the issue.

(END OF UPDATE)

Now I wanted to compare this log-plot of running times with swimming. I've noticed a recent growth in longer distance swimming events growing in popularity. Consider for instance the 10km "marathon" swim introduced to the Olympics in 2008. Like running, swimming has distances ranging from 50 meters to many miles. I took a ratio of the men and women's records for pool races here (freestyle only). For longer distances I used records from the one and two crossing swims across the English Channel. The Channel is about 35 kilometres wide and a double crossing (there and back) took 16 hours 10 minutes for Philip Rush and Susie Maroney in 17:14 (both Australian). For a medium-long swim distance  (3.86 km), I chose the fastest exit swim times of the 2012 Hawaiian Ironman.

The opposite trend results in distance swim events as the running. In this case the fastest women are begin to match the best men. The ratios dip under 1.10 very quickly, i.e. all racing distance longer than 100m show less than a 10% difference between genders.

At more than 70 km/16 hours of swimming, however, the number of participants dwindle fast due to the dangers of drowning, so I didn't search for longer swims than this. That makes the women's times even more impressive, as there are so few competing. One hypothesis why women begin to catch men is that women have naturally high body fat percentages. But I wonder about this, as how difficult can it be for a man to gain body fat weight while still maintaining muscle. Not to mention men are taller swimmers which may add a possible advantage (certainly in a pool, anyway). The answer must be more complex.

Let me stop over-speculate. If anyone has a good explanation I'd love to hear about it.