Discussion: breaking 50

I have no idea why times were off this year. Seemed like ideal conditions, but the stopwatch sure didn't agree. If anything, this was a slightly slow year (though certainly not slow enough for me to use that as the excuse for not being under an hour).

Yeah, looking at the results it seems like things were a bit "slow". Strange. I guess Justin rolled his ankle, stopped for a bit, then decided to continue on despite potential injury.

Maybe contributing factors? I thought a lot of people over-dressed and then overheated. Also, the ground was really hard - feet took a beating and the shoes loosened up on the downhills. With the ground as hard as it was, I didn't feel like I could go as fast as I wanted on the descents.

Hmmm. I thought the ground was surprisingly soft. Not frozen solid like I expected. Plenty firm enough for fast times, but I've certainly run on harder. Overdressing may have been an issue for some, though I didn't see many in wave 0 wearing much more than me (tights and a long-sleeved tech shirt).

Well -- congrats on your PR Bill! Conditions must not have been too off. I conclude random/coincidental issues experienced by all the front-runners (new/existing injuries, fitness/training issues, etc.) resulting in nobody having a great day.

You may be right about that. Modeling the number under an hour as a Poisson random variable with mean=17, there's a 13% chance that 12 or fewer break the hour. Not particularly unlikely. If you let the mean be a random variable indicating the fact that the expected number changes each year due to field composition, the probability is even higher. So, quite possibly a normal year with a confluence of off results at the front of the field. At any rate, a PR is a PR, so I'll second the congrats to Bill without qualification.

Actually if you throw out first place, the next 9 finishers were collectively only 7 seconds slower than 2015.

Umm, I'm not terrbily familiar w/ the Poisson random variable methodology, but I knew I could count on Eric for some data to back up my hypothesis. That's awesome, thank you for that! :)

Interesting analysis re: 2015, however, if I recall correctly it was unseasonably warm and humid. To me, those conditions would be an automatic pace-killer so it seems like 2015 should be slower than 2016 based on conditions alone.

Yeah, random variables aside, the fact that 2015 was actually faster than 2016 would argue that this was a legit slow year. Still, random samples can be misleading, as anybody who's lived in this country for the last 6 months should know.

Womp womp