Chicago Marathon 2010 preview: Close finishes

A quick look back at some recent and epic marathon racing

This week begins the countdown to the 33rd Chicago Marathon, which is now just over five days away.  Even with Ryan Hall's late withdraw from the field, it promises to be a competitive bunch with several athletes well capable of going under 2:06 with a few capable of sub-2:05.  But the real story is that the current champs from Chicago (Wanjiru), Boston (Robert Cheruiyot), and London (Kebede) are all lining up to do battle next Sunday.  It is a young field, as all of those athletes are 23 or younger, and we can add to them 2:05 man (2010 Rotterdam) Vincent Kipruto.  But wait!  Don't forget about Deriba Merga, too, the hard-running 2009 Boston champ who recently ran a 1:02:31 half at altitude----2456 m (8355 feet) in Bogota, Colombia.

But before analyzing the fields too much, we just wanted to have a quick and fun look at some recent and close marathon finishes, in the hopes that this year in Chicago we see some more of this.  (NB:  if you are reading this in an email message because you are a subscriber, click here to go to the site to watch the videos.)

Also, some time late Sunday night, The Science of Sport saw its two millionth visitor!  Thanks to all of our readers for helping us hit this milestone even faster than it took us to get to one million visits, we are truly grateful for your support!

Berlin Marathon 2003:  Tergat holds off pacer to be first under 2:05

First up is Paul Tergat's WR in Berlin in 2003, where he barely held off a surging Sammy Korir to set the record and be the first under 2:05.  Interestingly, Korir was then the second fastest of all time for a couple of years, but never before nor since that race has he even come close to that time again.  It begs the question why, and speaks to the "non-physiological" barriers to achieving peak performance.

 

New York City Marathon 2005:  Ramaala vs. Tergat

Next up is NYC 2005, where defending champ Hendrik Ramaala fought hard and nearly pulled off a repeat win from Paul Tergat.  It was the closest NYC finish on record.  It gets good right around the 1:45 mark of the clip, and there is a fantastic overhead shot of both runners going for the finish, both fighting for the win, and one does not need to know anything about running to see how hard these two are fighting for it.  Simply amazing!

  Nov 6, 2005 - Photo Finish at the New York City Marathon

- Watch more Videos at Vodpod.

Chicago 2007:  Ivuti pips Gharib at the line

Everyone recalls Chicago 2007, but perhaps not because of the amazing finish between relatively unknown Patrik Ivuti and veteran Jaouad Gharib.  Ivuti was fourth in the 10000 m in Sydney, but who remembers that?  Beyond that, he was a distant 5th in Chicago 2005 and no one owuld have bet on him to beat a seasoned racer like Gharib.  Again, amazing aerial shot of the two turning on to Columbus Drive, the finishing straight, with Gharib at least five meters in front of Ivuti.  Watch at around 40 s, as Gharib looks over his shoulder and seemingly cannot believe he has not dropped Ivuti!

Chicago 2007:  The women's race

Incredibly, after watching Ivuti barely beat Gharib, after waiting for the replay from a marathon race to confirm the winner, anyone watching surely could not believe what happened in the women's race.  Debutante Adriana Pirtea seemed to have the race wrapped up with what everyone thought was an insurmountable lead over Berhane Adere.  The highlight:  starting at around 2:20, when Pirtea begins waving to the crowd, all the while as Adere is storming down Columbus behind her!

Rotterdam 2009:  Kibet vs. Kwambai in 2:04:27

Finally, just last year in Rotterdam, another amazing race down the stretch as James Kwambai and Duncan Kibet fought it out to become the third and fourth fastest men over 42.2 km.  You can read a more detailed race report here, but it was a actually a three-man race until just before 40 km, when Abel Kirui was finally gapped by 20 s.  We see the result of Kwambai's attack around the one-minute mark, and at that point it looks like a winning move---few would have bet against him at that point, but we all know what happened next:

This was the best video we could procure to embed here, because Universal Sports has blocked embedding of their footage of the race.

The novelty of a close finish---or not?

Back in 2008, as part of our London Preview, we looked at over 100 races of the past 10 or so years to investigate the winning margin.  Surprisingly, a full 25% of those races were decided by 10 s or less.  That means at least two runners were together until quite late in the race.  Below is a reproduction of that analysis, showing the margin of victory sorted from highest to smallest.  Missing is the 2009 Rotterdam finish between Kibet and Kwambai.

So bring on "10-10-10," as the race is being promoted around the city here, because with Kebede now starting there is at least one person who on paper can perhaps match Wanjiru down the stretch, and with the late addition or Merga we can be assured of some aggressive racing if he follows his standard operating procedure.  

The long range forecast is looking fantastic with cool evening temps (50s F/13-14 C) , plenty of sunshine, and light winds.  If that holds, the chances of a real challenge for the record go up quite a bit, because two of the runners who have the potential are starting the race.  

Stay tuned this week for a look back at some of the key issues around the 2007 race, including  fluid balance and dehydration, and the effects of heat on performance!

Jonathan

David Rudisha - 1:41.09 World Record!

David Rudisha breaks the world record over 800m:  1:41.09!

Breaking news, not much to say yet, and sadly, I didn't even see this race, but David Rudisha has delivered on his exceptional promise and broken the 800m world record in Berlin today!

His time of 1:41.09 took the narrowest 0.02s margin off legend Wilson Kipketer's previous best, set back in 1997.

The splits from the race had the pacemaker hitting 400m in 48.65s, and then Rudisha led to 600m in 1:14.54.

Rudisha was reportedly about 4m behind the rabbit at the bell, so an estimated time of about 49.1 s at the bell seems reasonable.  This was followed by a third 200m that would have taken approximately 25.3s, with a final quarter in 26.64 seconds.

Estimates for Rudisha's lap times would be around 49.1 seconds followed by 52 seconds.

That's about the optimal way to run it.  Wilson Kipketer, for those who are wondering, set two world records (and equaled Seb Coe's world record before that), and his halves for all three runs are shown below:

1:41.73 (equal WR):  49.61 s + 52.12 s
1:41.24:  48.3 s + 52.9 s
1:41.11:  49.3 s + 51.8 s

Brief comment on pacing - 49s for the first lap is essential

Difficult to read too much into the times, other than to say that the first lap certainly wasn't too fast - you have to run the first lap in close to 49 seconds to have a chance.  In fact, of interest is that the fastest ever SECOND lap in a World record performance came way back in 1972, when Dave Wottle ran a second lap of 51.4 seconds on route to a 1:44.3s in Eugene, Oregon, to break the record.

The reason this is of interest is because the world record has been improved by over 3 seconds since then, and the improvement has come entirely by running the first lap faster!  Therefore, anyone with aspirations of beating 1:41.09 (as of today!) has to accept that it may not be possible to run the second lap in under 51 seconds on route to that kind of performance.  So, if you are on the start line contemplating a 1:41, you really need to work backwards from as close to 52s for the second as your physiology will allow, and then you find that you must hit the bell at 49 seconds.  Rudisha did just that.

In any event, enough analysis for now, perhaps more can come later.  For now, let's celebrate a rare event - a World Record in a middle distance event!  Usain Bolt has given us records in the sprints, but the middle distance record books have been gathering dust for a few years, and so this is a fabulous performance, from a young athlete (still only 21) who may yet go faster.

Video to come as soon as I find it!

Ross

Does human growth hormone improve performance?

Breaking down the findings on hGH

When our resident maven Jim Ferstle sent us the story about the how human growth hormone (hGH) can produce a 0.4 second improvement in 100 m sprinting, our ears pricked up and we were listening.  It got us searching for the article immediately, only to find that the current issue of Annals of Internal Medicine is not yet available electronically.  If you are at a university and want to read it now, maybe try heading down to your health sciences library and checking the current issues section for Issue #9 of that journal, where you will find the text by Udo Meinhardt.

But what we did find were several other articles on the topic, including a good review that examines several studies that have administered hGH in various subject populations.  So as a prelude to the most recent study, we thought we would provide some background on what the current evidence tells us about this hormone.

All athletes use it?

The first issue to address here is the widespread belief that those athletes who are doping are using hGH as part of their alleged cocktails of drugs.  We do know from books like Game of Shadows and by other admissions (Ben Johnson, Tim Montgomery, Lyle Alzado, and more) that some of the top athletes have indeed used the substance.  However until recently there has not been a test for the hormone, and so the reality is that we have absolutely no idea exactly how widespread its use really is.

But one thing we can be sure of is that, independent of what the science and physiology say, athletes are using it.  If we have learned anything from those athletes who have been caught and described their doping programs, it is that if they think it will provide some advantage, and if there is no test for it, it will quickly become a widely (ab)used substance.  Exhibit A:  Marion Jones taking EPO.  Too much is on the line for the athletes and the sporting administrators, and to think that top athletes in any sport do not dope is to be grossly naiive.

What the evidence tells us about hGH

We have not performed an exhaustive search by any means, but rather in response to the article that is about to be published in Annals of Internal Medicine we have rounded up an "executive summary" of what we know about hGH and sport.  Below is a table that we have reproduced from the review article "Growth hormone administration:  Is it safe and effective for athletic performance?" by the same group who have authored the Annals paper (click to enlarge):

The first thing you see is that the subject populations are varied, ranging from "highly trained" to "untrained."  In many ways this is no fault of the scientists---I can only imagine the difficulty in executing these kinds of studies, and so to add an additional high hurdle in the form of elite or even sub-elite athletes as the test subjects would be crazy.  No, these investigators have done the best they can for the most part, and so we cannot fault them outright for that, although we all would like to see the effects of hGH on much better athletes.

The real limitation:  Your model or mine

The problem as I see it is not one of the test subjects, but rather the paradigm within which these authors work and attempt to answer their questions.  On browsing through these studies it seems the primary approach is one of two paths.  First, some are interested in an acute dose on the effects of (fat) metabolism during exercise and rest, and second, others hypothesize that enhancing muscle mass and strength by itself translates into better performance.

And therein lies the limitation to this body of work---because from where we sit as sports scientists, the main effect of hGH (and most doping products) is that they allow the athlete to complete more training and harder training.  Thus they allow the individual to sustain a larger overload without breaking down and becoming injured, and therefore the adaptations they make are larger, which in turn leads to better performance.

Few drugs have an acute effect, or rather what we should say is that the drugs that do have an acute effect are easily detected---read, amphetamines---and these went by the wayside many years ago as testing for them became cheaper and more prominent and therefore the likelihood of getting caught increased.

The study we want to see is one in which trained runners or cyclists are administered hGH and then prescribed specific training that has been shown to improve their type of performance.  For example, a typical training intervention that has been proven to improve cycling performance is 4-5 min intervals at ~80% of peak power output.  Most cyclists respond well to this training, but we have always mentioned individual variation here---the "responders" vs. the "non-responders."  And so the question becomes whether or not the hGH administration alters this response to the training, either by allowing the "non-responders" to cope and make adaptations or by enhancing the adaptations of the "responders."

Coping with stress, the real advantage

In addition to elevating the amount of stress an athlete can sustain during periods of heavy training, the other thing hormones like hGH will affect is one's ability to recover between competitions, which of course are in and of themselves periods of high physiological stress.  One of the most interesting and telling articles I have read about doping is not scientific in nature, but was written by ultra-endurance cyclist and journalist Stuart Stevens for Outside Magazine back in November 2003 (you can also listen to an interview with him here).  The magazine fronted him the money to seek out and pay for doping products while he trained for Paris-Brest-Paris, a quadrennial 1200 km "fun ride" in France.  Stevens went on to take hGH, testosterone, EPO, and eventually anabolic steroids.  Here is a quote about a 200 mile qualifying race he completes:

"The last time I'd ridden 200 miles, I felt awful the next day, like I'd been hit by a truck. After the Solvang race I woke up and felt hardly a touch of soreness. I also felt like I could easily ride another 200, and I realized that I'd entered another world, the realm of instant recovery. I'll be frank: It was a reassuring kind of world, and I could see why people might want to stay there."

So when we say something "enhances performance," it is a qualified statement because that might mean it changes something directly related to performance, or it might also mean that something reduces recovery time thus allowing an athlete to complete more high-quality training and therefore make larger adaptations.  And not to mention the beneficial effects for athletes who complete in multi-day events who can wake up feeling, in Stevens' words, "hardly a touch of soreness," and ready to punish themselves for 4-5 h again the next day.

Sports Science meets Internal Medicine

The future of these studies will be when sports scientists team up with the internal medicine physicians who study the hormones and produce the training studies that will measure the true effect of drugs such as hGH on performance.  In the mean time, as is most often the case, how you interpret the available evidence depends entirely on your paradigm.  So if you think VO2max predicts performance, you administer hGH, show no effect, and conclude accordingly that hGH does not enhance exercise performance.  For now we will wait for the most recent study by Meinhardt to be published, and will follow up on this this post when we have a chance to digest it.

Jonathan


Some articles of interest:

Anything by HOLT and SONKSEN on Pubmed, they have written a virtual thesis on hGH.

Widdowson WM et al., The physiology of growth hormone and sport.  Growth hormone & IGF Research.  19:308-19, 2009.

Birzniece V et al., Growth hormone administration:  is it safe and effective for athletic performance?  Endocrinology and Metabolism Clinics of North America.  39:11-23, 2010.

An Olympic musical - why every millisecond matters

The Winter Games draws to a close with an Olympic musical

Canada sits atop the Winter sporting world this morning, having claimed a record 14 gold medals in their home Olympic Games.  It's a record for any Games, beating the previous record of 13 held by Norway (Salt Lake City, 2002) and the Soviet Union (Innsbruck, 1976).

The 14th medal also probably felt like five for Canada, as their men's hockey team defeated the USA in overtime, exacting revenge for a 5-3 defeat earlier in the tournament.

The USA, for their part, will be content to have won the most medals at the Games, 37 in total, though "only" 9 were gold.  Much like Beijing, they were eclipsed for the top step on the podium, but depth of performances saw them gather a record number of medals.  After an excellent start, they were on track to top both the gold and total counts, but Canada won 10 medals in the last week of the Games, to storm to the top.  An amazing turn-around, considering that Canada had never won a gold medal on home soil until moguls skier Alexandre Bilodeau broke the drought.

Money in = medals out, and the value of being at home

The results once again highlight the value of home-ground advantage in the Olympic Games - few host nations have not excelled on the medal table - Spain, Australia, Italy, China, and even Greece come to mind as countries who have seen a spike in their medal tallies as hosts.  That says a lot about money invested - the relationship between money in and medals out is pretty well established in high performance sport, unless of course money is squandered in an inefficient or corrupt system (think Athletics South Africa where 80% of the money in goes towards unnecessary salaries, various perks and who knows what else...).  Hosting the Games means investing money in athlete preparation, a strategy used by China to win the most golds in Beijing in 2008. 

There is also the intangible benefit of competing at home, less easy to quantify or even explain, but it adds to that tiny 1% that an athlete needs to move from becoming part of the group to becoming its champion.  I posted the other day on the mental vs physiological edge, and I really do believe that the mental edge provided by being at home (assuming of course that the athlete doesn't collapse under the weight of expectation, when home ground advantage can have the opposite effect), contributes significantly to performance.  We have seen this in soccer - France in 1998, Korea & Japan in 2002, Germany in 2006 (whether South Africa can produce the same in 2010 remains to be seen...).

The Olympic musical - 4 years of training to be note on the timeline

Speaking of 1% differences, here is a website that is well worth a look - a fascinating piece from the New York Times looking at the margins between victory and defeat as "an Olympic musical" (thanks again to Joe for the link), where each sound effectively represents an athlete crossing the finish line after the winner.

We all recognize how tight the margins in sport are are.  No one who follows high performance sport will tell you that victory is ever achieved easily.  For example, if you play the musical for The Men's Super G skiing event (fourth from top), think for a second about the 7th note you hear.  It's basically indistinguishable from the third note, but that difference in sound is the difference between feeling that four years of training have produced something (a bronze medal) compared to a feeling of "if only".

Another fascinating event is the women's 1000m speedskating, won by Christine Nesbitt of Canada, in what was the closest finish of the Games (the same margin separated Germany and Japan in the women's pursuit race but that is not shown).  The 10th placed athlete was 0.87s behind, which is an enormous gap at that level, but the musical makes it easy to conceptualize how 'unforgiving' the sport can be.

It really strikes home when you think of it this way:  If that women's 1000m race were to be contested another 10 times,  there is a high probability that the same three women would win the medals again.  Perhaps the order would change slightly, they'd swap medals, but I'm pretty confident in saying that Christine Nesbitt would feature every time, probably win at least 50% of the races if they were re-run.

You would certainly feel that the chances of the 10th placed finisher jumping seven places to win a medal are very slim indeed.  Yet when you conceptualize it by listening to that musical time-line, the 10th note is over in the blink of an eye, yet that gap is too large to be overcome merely by more effort.  That athlete, a beep in a musical time line, is simply too far away to challenge for medal in their current condition, regardless of motivation.  And if that is true for her, then think of the woman who finished 4th, only 0.06s off the podium.

The only thing that will see that gap narrowed is a year, maybe two, maybe even four years of hard training or some other intervention that changes the athlete, either physiologically or psychologically - think altitude training, more power-based work at the gym, sports psychology, equipment etc.

Those are the margins which separate the medalists from those who have reached the pinnacle of the sport, yet they are so far.  I spoke the other day of the "so near yet so far syndrome" in elite sport, where you can at once be within touching distance, but the gap is almost insurmountable.  This illustrates it really nicely.

The other thing, as an aside which I have to take, is that it really highlights how doping messes up the natural order.  A drug doesn't have to transform an athlete's physiology to have a huge effect on the outcome - a 1% improvement is enough to make this musical completely different.  Laboratories usually can't find these margins of performance difference, and so when evidence is scarce that a drug has a beneficial effect, think of these Olympic musicals to understand why science doesn't necessarily have to prove anything.  They just work...

Sports Science and four years of effort 

It's really a remarkable illustration of what high performance sport is all about, and what we as scientists are all about.  Because if you are a sports scientist reading this, and you don't recognize that you are hunting that kind of performance improvement, then you're in the wrong industry!  The reason excellence, or even perfection in preparation matters, is because if you fail to aim for perfection, then you fall short and your athlete becomes a sound-byte, not the starting note!


I have some more thoughts on the Winter Olympics, despite my very limited exposure to them on SA TV, but I'll put those over for a day.

Ross

The mental edge: Thoughts and opinions

The mental edge or physiology - what separates champions from contenders?

It's been far too long between posts for me - I do apologize, but as Jonathan said in yesterday's post, things have been rather frantic for both of us.  And seem likely to continue, but (fortunately, I guess), I'm recovering from jet-lag and a round-the-world trip which has me waking up at 4am, so I finally have time on my hands!

The Vancouver Winter Olympics have depressingly reached the last few days, and I've seen basically none of them.  Snow and ice are not big in South Africa, so at the best of times, I'd be reserved in my commentary on Winter sports.  In the past, though, we've usually had live coverage of the Games, but for some reason, 2010 has seen us limited to a daily 60-minute highlights package, which is so poor Sometimes the video and the words are not even related, or it's factually incorrect - "Austria takes the lead", when clearly they're lying in third place, for example), that I can't even make a passing comment on what has been happening!  , and I've seen perhaps 60 seconds of each event.

It's a pity, because I think there's so much unexplored science the Winter sports - our good friends Carl Foster and Jos de Koning have published heavily on speed skating, for example, and that would have been great fun to discuss!  I don't feel "current" enough to do justice to the topic, however, because I'm so detached from the snow and ice in Vancouver (Carl, Jos, if you feel like a 'guest post', the space is yours!)

The mental edge:  Fact or fiction?

In any event, yesterday's post inspired a rather energetic debate on the mental side to performance - well worth a read in the comments section to the post.  I thought it would be an interesting follow-up to give my own thoughts and opinions on an issue which really has no correct answer, only ideas and theories!

The issue, I guess, is this:  To what extent are the best athletes mentally stronger than rivals, or does it come down to physiology?  Upfront, I suppose the "safe" answer is that it's neither, but a combination of the two that determines success.  Without either, it's not possible to reach the pinnacle of the sport, and history is littered with athletes who have either;
a) Failed to achieve what their physical potential (whatever that means in the context of this debate) suggests they should; or
b) Exceeded expectations, defied their own limitations and achieved much more than they may have been expected to.

In the case of a), we usually say that these athletes lacked the mental edge, they didn't have that "killer instinct" or drive to put the time in, or even if they did, they couldn't produce when it counted.  In the case of b), we say that these athletes dug deeper, emptied their reserves and approached training and competition with an attitude and desire that gave them 1% more, enough to win.

The 10% physical, 90% mental philosophy

Both arguments are likely massive oversimplifications.  I remember doing a short course on sports psychology/coaching during my sports management degree, and we were lectured by a very successful and now extremely well known coach and trainer, who also had a background in psychology.  He put to us the question:  "What is the breakdown between physical and mental components to success?"

The class eventually reached the opinion that success in sport was "10% physical, 90% mental".  There were some who felt it was the other way around, that mental contributed only 10% to success.  Others said 50-50.  Some got philosophical and said it was "100% mental, 100% physical" (which is probably, cheesily enough, the best argument, in my opinion).  But there's rarely agreement - you can see this difference in opinion in our previous post, in fact, where Gene and Sean have debated the merits of the argument, though not necessarily in these terms.  Point is, we're split as to how valuable each component is.

Note that the answer is never correct, and it's never wrong (well, I think 90-10 splits are probably wrong, both ways).  It's also context specific.  Golf is different to athletics.  Long jump probably differs from high jump, both of which differ from the marathon.  Downhill skiing no doubt requires substantial parts of each, and also required different skills WITHIN each.

Mental and physiological:  Difficult to pin down

Compare for a second the approach of Usain Bolt to say, Roger Federer.  Bolt has changed the way athletes behave before the start of events.  Even the reserved Kenenisa Bekele now seems loose and relaxed, which is one aspect to this mental side of preparation.  You wouldn't call Bolt unfocused though, and his relaxation, his mental approach to sprinting may well have been a big part of his success.  Federer, on the other hand, is equally focused, but is just as relaxed.  So is Rafael Nadal, and I dare say Tiger Woods is as focused and relaxed (no jokes, please!  I'm tempted myself...), but you'll never see these three behave like Bolt seconds before competition or during.

Bode Miller was put forward as a case of an athlete who succeeds because of his mental toughness, his courage and fighting spirit.  Four years ago, it was very different - he was labeled a choker, and perhaps the change has been thanks to sports psychology.  This may well be true, but how do we characterize that?  Is it because he's brash and confident, a risk-taker, off the slopes?  Does his personality in any way influence our assessment of his mental attitudes in competition?  At that precise moment on the slopes when he is making a decision on which line to take, travelling at 100km/hour, is he different from Askel-Lund Svindal in terms of his mental approach?  I don't know - I would be very surprised if our generalities and easy explanations, always in hindsight, explained the 0.1 seconds that separate gold from silver. 

So what precisely do we mean when we say that "Athlete X has a psychological advantage or mental edge?"  I don't think we often know, but it would involve things like competitive spirit, big match temperament, attitude and discipline to both competition and training, ability to relax but stay focused under pressure, to match the expectation from fans and rivals, self-belief, confidence, desire, and so forth.

We employ sports psychologists to work with athletes on things like visualization, relaxation and focus, because we understand that the failure to achieve certain non-negotiable standards will undermine talent.  Whether this approach can compensate for a lack of talent, I must confess I'm not so sure. 

The fallacy of physiological superiority 

Similarly, and this is an area where I can conclude more definitively, we tend to find physiological explanations that don't exist.  If I had a dollar for every person who says that Lance Armstrong wins races because he has a 'super-human' VO2max, or that he produces less lactate than other riders, I'd be running this site as a full-time occupation, sipping cocktails on an island!  It's simply not true - if I gave you a chart of 50 top athletes' VO2max values, and asked you to identify who would win, you'd have more chance throwing a dart into the chart than of correctly working it out.

The reality is that physiological factors, at least for these sports, are too intangible to pin down, and success is never down to one thing.  Lance Armstrong has "average" values compared to other elite athletes, and if there is a physiological difference, it's 0.1% in size, too small for us to measure.

Having said that, to say that all the top athletes are equal is also not entirely correct.  As I've mentioned, the differences are incredibly small - Contador wins the Tour de France because he can sustain a power output 2% higher than the next person for a cumulative total of 60 minutes during a three week race.  That creates the margin, which in the end, is substantial.

1% differences and interwoven factors for success

I can give the most topical example (for me, anyway) and it comes from Sevens Rugby.  The Olympic Games' newest sport plays out in an 8-tournament series around the world, the most recent tournaments taking place in New Zealand and the USA.  I've been fortunate enough to travel with the SA team (hence the round-the-world trip), who are the defending world champions, and so have reached that summit.

There are eight top teams, each of which can win any given tournament. They all have athletes who, on paper, are inseparable and extra-ordinary.  One would, broadly speaking, call them equal.  The training and physiological ability are similar, as are skill levels - all the top teams do largely similar warm-ups, training drills, gym routines.  The 5% difference between them is significant, of course, and that's the 5% that we spend hours striving to find.  1% is often enough, and there are certainly 1% differences in various components, at any level (for example, Lionel Messi has more skill than other soccer players). 

Looking back on the last two tournaments, there are "ifs" and "buts" all over the place.  Had we converted only 10% more of our chances, we might have won both tournaments.  At crucial moments in matches, players have just failed to press home an advantage, and the result has been a "so near, yet so far" feeling.  We are close, but need to do a lot of work, a strange paradox, which I think is typical of sport.

The point I want to make, though, is that when we go BACK and analyze matches, it's very easy to identify the five or six moments that determined the outcome.  This is particularly easy when playing the weaker teams, because then you can identify how their defensive patterns were not quite as sound as they should have been, how they don't quite execute moves with precision and as a result are turned over, and so forth.  Against the top opposition, where any team can win, it's a lot more difficult, but still possible to pinpoint the reasons for victory and defeat.

These reasons are never exclusively physical (we missed tackles, for example, or were out-muscled in contact) and they are never exclusively mental (we made wrong decisions, took poor options, for example).  They are always a combination of the two, and the only solution is to spend many more hours working on both, simultaneously.  A player or athlete who fails may do so because they take an incorrect option (a wrong pass, or a wrong line on the ski slopes, for example), or because they fail to execute the right option (a skier who finds the right line but just can't hold the speed and has to adjust and slow down, for example).

The two are so intimately related that I think it's ultimately self-defeating to diagnose the reason for success or failure as one or the other.  It has to be both, and they work off each other in a cycle.  

The "filter" of elite sport

One thing that is certain, and I'll end on this, is that the absence of either is usually glaringly obvious - an athlete who lacks talent is exposed, as a junior in many cases, and never reaches the Olympic Games.  An athlete who has abundant talent, but lacks the mental edge, may fade into obscurity because they don't have the drive or discipline to train, or because they don't compete well. 

The athlete who lacks confidence or self-belief stands out among the crowd eventually - they reach the "highest level of insecurity", if you will, before being exposed, often spectacularly.  On the other hand, the athlete who lacks talent often disappears into the middle of the pack and obscurity.  Perhaps this is why we have identified mental aspects as so crucial, the source of the 90-10 principle?

I believe that both components are essential.  An athlete at the top of the world has both in the right measure, though possibly in different amounts.  To suggest that one athlete won because "they wanted it more" is actually disrespectful to the other athletes - at the Olympic level, ten athletes may possess, in varying combinations, the characteristics required to succeed - extra-ordinary physiological ability, mental toughness, self-belief, desire to overcome opponents and challenges (like Lindsey Vonn).  One will win, and trying to explain why they did often subjects us, as Gene has said, to the error of hindsight analysis, where we can pull out reasons that are ultimately biased by our starting position!

My bias is that genetic factors provide the starting point, environmental factors point the person in the course they will take, and that coaches, peers and family work out the genetic potential over many years of training and competition.  By the time that athlete wins an Olympic title, they cannot lack any ingredient, because the nature of elite sport is that it filters out those who possess only 99% of what it takes at each level.  The 99% may make up the field, but the winner has 100%.  Of what, I don't think we'll ever quite know.

Ross

Are marathon times getting faster or not?

A Further Analysis of Marathon Performances

As US fans continue to drink in the first American victory in New York since 1982, we thought we would follow up the race report with a further analysis of marathon times.  If you read the comments to the race report, Joe Garland and cassio598 mentioned that in the early years of the race the course was four laps through Central Park, and that to examine the progression of times we should rather analyze the winning times since 1976.  The graph in question is this one here:

So in 1976 the current race course was adopted, the one that passes through all five boroughs, and since then the average winning time has deviated year-to-year by only about 90 s and has gone below 2:08 only once (in 2001 when Jifar set the current course record).  The blips, for your information, are from 1984 when the ambient temperature was in the upper 70s F with 60-90% humidity, and 1990, when the max temperature on the course was 79 F.

One of the readers, cassio598, suggested analyzing the data from 1976 to the present, because then it appears that the winning time creeps lower over time.  And the verdict?

The regression line for these data does indeed move in a downward direction, however the coefficient of determination ("r-squared") is only 0.16, which does not suggest a very good fit.  But the bigger issue is that since 1981 there have been six times that are very close to 2:08, and so it is hard to conclude that the times are getting faster when almost 30 years ago the winning time was one minute faster than the winning time this year.

The nature of the course:  A peculiar finding

Perhaps the really interesting comparison comes from looking at the the "current" average times of all the big city marathons---London, Boston, Berlin, Chicago, and New York---and see how the times of this decade compare to the "average" times from a decade ago.  So what you see below is the average winning time from 1990-99 (blue column) compared to the average winning time from 2000-09 (red column) for all of the above-mentioned races.

Recall that Chicago, London, and Berlin are flat courses, while NYC and Boston are not flat.  You can see that the winning time for all the flat courses has decreased by about 2.0% while NYC and Boston have remained more or less the same.  How is that?  Even when scrutinizing the Boston data, it comes out that in 1983 the last American to win, Greg Meyer, ran 2:09:00.  It also turns out that the average winning time for the Kenyans (and a Kenyan has won Boston many many times!) is 2:09:32.

One key factor is pace-makers - at least for the last few years, neither Boston nor New York have employed pace-makers, whereas Berlin, London and Chicago have.  Berlin, in particular, has evolved into a staged record attempt every year.  Fast times are designed on these flatter courses, and that is certainly a factor to take into account.  However, it does not explain why the Kenyan dominance, particularly in Boston, has been sustained with slower times than in the 1990s (and, as in the case of Meyer, the early 1980s!)

This all leads me to believe that the less than flat nature of these two courses may "neutralize" the speed of the East Africans.  How this works we have not figured out just yet, but how can it be that while the average best American marathon time is so many minutes slower than the best African times, yet on courses like these we had runners over 20 years ago running just as fast as the Africans are running now?

Conservative race strategy?

Perhaps the hilly nature of Boston and New York dictate a more comfortable (i.e. ~2:09) pace for the first half, as no one wants to blitz the first 20 km in 57 min only to have the wheels come off during any bumps in the second half.

One question we asked ourselves after New York was, "What if Wanjiru ran New York. . .?"  Because if he ran aggressively like he ran Beijing, London and Chicago, at halfway he might have had only two runners with him and not seventeen others as was the case in New York.  With all due respect to Meb, if the 21.1 km split was 1:03:00 and not 1:05:11, he and most of that pack would likely not have been there to contest the race around Manhattan.  Having said that, however, it will be really interesting to see how Meb goes next year, because he did set a half marathon PB this year with a 61:00 back in April.

The fastest of the fast:  Berlin

One thing that also comes out of the graph above is that Berlin has been the fastest course around for years.  We all know why the average time since 2000 is about 2:06:20, but even in the 1990s Berlin was almost one minute faster than London and Chicago.  Seeing as how the margins are so tight now, it seems that Berlin is perhaps the course most likely to produce the next marathon world record.  Previously, when the record was "softer" and still above 2:05, the turns, bumps and cobbles of courses like London were not really obstacles.  Now, however, the record is so close to the limits of the current crop of potentials that even having to take several extra 90 degree turns will be meaningful.

Dubai may become the new player on the record scene, and along with Berlin, has become one of Gebrselassie's two paced record attempts each year (as it will be in 2010).  So it may have the fastest time of all, but being such a recent race, and really only by virtue of the fact that Geb has chosen it, it hasn't proven itself over decades, yet.

The answer to the title of this post:  YES!

If we looked only at New York and Boston we might conclude that, no, times are not getting faster, because in those two races there seems to be a real limit in the form of the race course.  While a 2:07 in either of those races will almost guarantee you a win and probably the course record too, a 2:07 in London is only good enough to squeeze into the top five and probably a podium in Chicago, but no guarantees you will be victorious.  But obviously the times are getting faster, because we have seen a progression of world records in 5000 and 10000 all the way up to 42.2 km, and no one would argue with that.

What we have stated before is that the marathon class of 2009 has been particularly fast, and that actually warrants an analysis on its own---between Kibet's and Kwambai's 2:04:27 in Rotterdam, Wanjiru's 2:05:10 in London, Gebrselassie's 2:06:13 in Berlin, Wanjiru's 2:05:41 in Chicago, and even Vincent Kipruto's 2:05:47 in Paris, the average winning time this year is 2:05:28, which might be the fastest average for one year!

Jonathan

New York 2009: Race analysis and splits

New York 2009: Splits and race analysis

If you've come here for live splits, I'm afraid I have been beaten by technology this time around. Between the feed from Universal Sports breaking up on me every 2 seconds, and the hotel wireless access in Boston, I did not manage to even watch the race, let alone document the splits. Even now, 8 hours later, I can't watch the race for long enough to even comment sensibility on what went down.

I have seen the race reports, and I would have loved to comment on what were two huge upsets - Meb Keflezighi and Deratu Tulu would have been long-odds leading into the race, but they came out on top in what must rank as the biggest surprises of the year's Marathon Majors, by a long way.

I'm off to New York tomorrow, where I'll try again to watch the race, and then maybe, I'll even feel compelled to comment. I'll try to get some split times up if I can (better late than never). But for now, I'm disappointed that I wasn't able to follow the race, and apologize for not delivering on our usual race analysis - this is, I noticed, the first marathon I've missed since London 2007.

So huge apologies, I will try my best to get a post on the race done at some point!

Ross

New York Marathon Preview and predictions

New York, New York: The final swing on the 2009 Marathon calendar

Sunday sees the final marathon of the Fall season in the World Marathon Majors in New York, and it's one of the most exciting fields of the year (only London matches the men's field for competitive depth). So I'm interrupting the series on coaching and science to pull out the crystal ball and look ahead to the race, where a course record, at least on the men's side, seems a real possibility.

New York is arguably the toughest course of the Majors. At least, it's record times suggest this, with a men's record only just inside 2:08. Back in 1989, Juma Ikangaa ran 2:08:01, and that would last for 12 years before Tesfaye Jefar nudged it down to 2:07:43, which stands are the current record.

Given that London, Berlin, Paris, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Dubai and Chicago all have course records under 2:06, that 2:07:43 stands out. The twisting roads, short hills on bridges and around Central Park make NY a tough race. And a tough race can throw up surprise winners, as it has in the past.

Last year, Marilson Gomes dos Santos managed to claw back "Mr Second place", Abderrahim Goumri, in what was an exciting finish. Goumri looked to have the race won, but dos Santos hung on and then shot past him, eventually winning by a large distance. It was dos Santos' second win, his first came two years earlier, in a race where it seemed the big guns decided to let him go, and couldn't catch up. That was a surprise. 2008 was a surprise (of sorts).

Don't expect another surprise on Sunday - dos Santos may be suited to NY, perhaps the tough course plays into his strengths, but I have a feeling that a top 5 is the best the defending champion can aim for. The way the marathon has leaped forward this year, I don't see a slow pace with surges, and I'm not sure that dos Santos is one to handle 2:05-intensity (even if the course turns this into a 2:07-pace).

The big 5

So then who to look out for? Well, three Kenyans, one Moroccan, and an American stand out as ones to watch.

The Kenyans are James Kwambai, Robert Cheruiyot and Patrick Makau. Neither Kwambai nor Makau have ever won a marathon. But Kwambai has twice broken 2:06 - once he accompanied Gebrselassie to 35km in Berlin (arguably contributing to a sub 2:04 time), and once he accompanied Duncan Kibet to the finish line in Amsterdam. On that occasion, he ran 2:04:27, the third fastest in history.

The problem for Kwambai, apart from not having winning momentum, is that he has a super fast half marathon very recently - as Lets Run.com have pointed out in their preview, a very fast half weeks before a marathon is often a sign that the athlete was on the edge for too long, and hits the marathon just slightly over-done. Wanjiru, they point out, ran a 61:08 in the same race as Kwambai ran 59:08, about six weeks ago. As you know, Wanjiru went on to run 2:05 in Chicago. So either Kwambai is going to rip New York apart, or he'll struggle after 30km. Not that it's unheard of to run great marathons soon after great half marathons, mind you. Martin Lel has won the Great North Run only a month before winning New York, his time in the GNR always under 60 minutes. So it can be done. But that's Lel, not Kwambai, and the final 5km may tell on Kwambai if he's is over optimal shape.

Robert Cheruiyot is an interesting case - 18 months ago, he was a dominant force in the marathon. He won Boston by attacking at about 21km, and destroyed the whole field. He was a Major series champion, a four-time Boston winner, and without doubt one of the top 2 in the world (Martin Lel was the other). But age, injury and illness seem to have slowed him, and he has struggled. He was a late addition to the field, after the withdrawal of Paul Tergat, at the tenth hour, and the question is whether his form is good enough to compete. I have a feeling he'll struggle, and his time at the top may be at an end. However, he warrants a mention, because as I say, it was only 18 months ago that he was near invincible. It shows how rapidly things can change in marathon running.

Patrick Makau is also an unknown quantity of sorts. His half-marathon credentials are excellent, with a 58:52 performance earlier this year. And he did debut in 2:06:14 earlier this year. That's a frighteningly fast first outing, and even a slight improvement makes him a big threat. I pick him to come second - inexperience will still count against him - remember that Gebrselassie took a few attempts to sort out the marathon race, and so Makau may yet evolve into a great champion, but New York will be a step, not a leap, in that direction

Jaouad Gharib is the man to watch, however. The Olympic Games silver medallist had always been a championship type runner, but earlier this year, he made a step up and in London, mixed it with Wanjiru and Kebede to finish third in a new best time of 2:05:27. That time suggests that Gharib is on the way up, not down, despite his relatively long career (he was world champion back in 2003 and 2005). He followed Beijing up with a great London performance, and he comes into NY as the favourite, in my opinion, now that Martin Lel has withdrawn. The one problem for Gharib, in my opinion, is whether he is assertive enough to make the running. In Beijing and London, he tracked moves until he couldn't, but ended up outlasting everyone but Wanjiru (and Kebede). Will he be assertive enough to throw it down in the Park? Time will tell...

Finally, we have Ryan Hall, the great American hope. Hall has been training well in Mammoth Lakes, I believe - I was at a symposium in Colorado Springs recently where his coach Terrence Mahon was a speaker, and it was revealed that Hall was regularly completing 18 mile training runs at about 5:00/mile pace at 7,500 feet (2,300m). That puts his NY preparation ahead of what he was doing for Boston earlier this year, so his condition is apparently good (as far as training reports can be relied upon, of course). He has some good half marathons in him, and is full of confidence, according to a RW interview with him recently.

So can Hall do it? The simple answer is yes, of course, because he's up at the level required of a champion marathon runner with a 2:06:17, which is the 4th best in the field. In New York, the difference between a 2:05 PB and a 2:06 PB is not as large is it is in say, London or Berlin, and Hall knows and enjoys the Central Park section of the race. But, as Letsrun have pointed out, his best is only 25th in history, such is the explosion in sub-2:06 times recently, but Hall is certainly a contender. Third in Boston earlier this year, behind an incredible run by Deriba Merga, suggest that Hall will at least be involved until the final few kilometers. So he can win, but I suspect it may be just too challenging in those final kilometers, and he'll finish third again.

So what does the podium look like, to sum up?

1. Jaouad Gharib - 2:07:22. Yes, the course record will fall, because 2009 has thrown marathon running into the new era, and NY will be pulled along with it. Expect a first half of around 1:03:10, with surges causing a slight slowing in the last half. Hendrik Ramaala of South Africa will feature in the early surges after halfway, but after 32km, he'll drop steadily off the pace.

2. Patrick Makau - he'll be with Gharib until the 40km, and will then slip back, finishing around 20 seconds down.

3. Ryan Hall - expect Hall to make the move that splits the race, at around 32km. A large group will be whittled down to four or five, and Hall will last enough to claim third, in a strong run, just outside 2:08.

Women's race: Paula all the way

The women's race is much easier to call. A spate of withdrawals has weakened the field considerably, and only Selinah Kosgei, this year's Boston champion, stands as a reasonable threat to the dominant runner over the last decade.

Paula Radcliffe's races are also pretty easy to anticipate - she runs hard, setting a tempo that is simply too quick to hold onto, and the field is cut one-by-one, until she's either all alone (as is normally the case), or one or two hang one, as was the case in a memorable race against Gete Wami back in 2007, where she won her second title.

This year should follow the former pattern, with Radcliffe pulling away to win relatively comfortably. The next question is whether she can get the course record, the 2:22:31 of Margaret Okayo. Radcliffe is a three-time winner in NY, with a best time of 2:23:09, back in 2007 during the Wami race. She's just recovered from a bout of tonsillitis, and with Radcliffe, you never know what injury hassles may have affected her training. She's been close to marathon shape for a long time, almost running the World Championships marathon in August, but deciding to withdraw late on because her form wasn't quite where she wanted it.

Then she withdrew from her home World Half-Marathon championships thanks to tonsillitis, so she's clearly been hovering on the brink of racing shape, but for a few problems. They won't affect her victory, but they might just prevent the record.

So I'll predict Paula to win, but just outside the record - 2:22:49.

Selinah Kosgei in second, somewhere in the mid 2:24 range.

Coverage of the race

And that, as always, was my crystal ball prediction! Tongue-in-cheek, of course!

For race coverage, as has been the case for the Majors, join us on Sunday, for live splits - not the 1km splits like for Chicago, unfortunately, but five kilometer times, if possible!

Ross

Chicago 2009 In-race splits

Splits from the 2009 Chicago Marathon

Below is a table with the kilometer splits (those we got) from today's Chicago marathon, which saw Sammy Wanjiru win his fourth major marathon - Fukuoka, Beijing, London and now Chicago.

His time? 2:05:41, one second inside the course record, so mission accomplished, at least from that point of view. The world record eluded him, but the cold, the wind and the pace-making (too fast early, didn't last long enough) didn't allow that.

The splits make for interesting reading. The early pace was unbelievably fast - 5km was reached in 14:34 and 10km was covered in 29:10, projecting a finish time under 2:03. It was hardly surprising that the pace slowed, and the second half of the race would be covered in 63:40, compared to the first half of 62:01. Abderrahim Goumri was sensible and probably ran the closest to an even split - 62:50 and 63:14.

Wanjiru's decisive move came just before 35km, when he shifted to drop the Kenyans who had kept pace up to that point.

The wind certainly played a role - it was coming from the North, and if you look at the table below, you'll see some really slow final kilometers - that's partly due to the race situation, the fast early pace, but also the wind, because the final stretch of the race is run directly into that wind.

Enjoy the splits below!

Thanks for following the coverage!

Ross & Jonathan

KM	Time	Elapsed time	Mile pace	Projected time	Weather
1	2:53	2:53	4:38	2:01:39	37F / 47%
2	2:53	5:46	4:38	2:01:39
3	2:56	8:42	4:43	2:02:22
4	2:53	11:35	4:38	2:02:12
5	2:59	14:34	4:48	2:02:56
6	2:53	17:27	4:38	2:02:43
7	2:52	20:19	4:37	2:02:28
8	2:58	23:17	4:46	2:02:48	38F / 43%
9	2:53	26:10	4:38	2:02:41
10	3:00	29:10	4:50	2:03:04
11	2:56	32:06	4:43	2:03:08
12	no time
13	5:52	37:58	4:43	2:03:14
14	2:58	40:56	4:46	2:03:21	37F / 44%
15	3:03	43:59	4:54	2:03:44
16	3:00	46:59	4:50	2:03:54
17	No time
18	6:02	53:01	4:51	2:04:17
19	No time
20	5:49	58:50	4:40	2:04:07
21	2:53	61:43	4:38	2:04:00
22	2:57	64:40	4:45	2:04:02
23	No time
24	No time
25	8:59	1:13:39	4:49	2:04:18
26	2:59	1:16:38	4:48	2:04:22
27	2:58	1:19:36	4:48	2:04:24	38F / 46%
28	2:50	1:22:26	4:34	2:04:13
29	2:59	1:25:25	4:48	2:04:17
30	3:21	1:28:46	5:23	2:04:51
31	3:00	1:31:46	4:50	2:04:54
32	2:58	1:34:44	4:46	2:04:55	38F / 45%
33	No time
34	6:16	1:41:00		2:05:21
35	2:58	1:43:58	4:46	2:05:21
36	2:54	1:46:52	4:43	2:05:15
37	2:55	1:49:47	4:42	2:05:12
38	3:00	1:52:47	4:50	2:05:14
39	3:01	1:55:48	4:51	2:05:17	38F / 43%
40	3:08	1:58:56	5:02	2:05:28
41	3:06	2:02:02	4:59	2:05:35
42	No time
F	3:39	final 1.195k	4:45	2:05:41

Note: The race doesn't do 1km splits, and so we're reliant on our own 'spotters' out on the course to report to us as the elites hit each kilometer mark, which we then match up against our official race timing. So we apologize for any missed splits, but here's our best efforts to track the race as it unfolds!

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Ross