Hi,
To introduce myself. I have just registered on the Forum although I did contribute occasionally to the MN newsletter. My name is Andy Milroy, longtime British RRC Statistician, Co-ordinator for global organisation, the Association of Road Racing Statisticians (ARRS), with a background in ultra stats.
The ARRS database maintained by Ken Young has over a half a million performances on it. The ARRS website - www.arrs.net - has deep and comprehensive stats on road and track long distance across a range of topics.
You may be interested to see an email that Ken Young sent to the IAAF statistician following the recent World Road Running Championships
Dear Ottavio,
It might interest you to know that the IAAF Road Championships this past Sunday produced 30 new national records (as kept by the ARRS). I think this was a very good move by the IAAF. It accomplishes two things.
One, it rekindles interest in distances other than marathon, half marathon, 10K, and 5K. The trend over the past decade has been to
standardize road distances, essentially limiting racing opportunities to just four distances. A number of European countries used to hold 25K road championships but all have changed to half marathons now.
Opportunities to race high-level 25K and 30K distances are almost entirely absent on the world scene. And yet, these distances are a more valuable preparation for racing marathons than the half marathon.
Two, it provides for a lot more publicity in the form of records. As we know, the media is interested in records. If a record is not produced in a race, their interest in it diminishes. The IAAF World Road
Championships are an ideal place for setting road records. Over the years that the distance was held at a half marathon, the national
records became of such high caliber that fewer and fewer national records were set at these championships. Changing to the 20K distance
has produced a wealth of new national records and new world records for men and women (according to the criteria used by the ARRS).
The 15K, 25K, and 30K national records are also very weak and hopefully, in the next few years, the IAAF World Road Championships will be held at these distances with a similar rewriting of the record books for those distances and a concomitant increase in the media interest.
As you may be aware, the ARRS maintains its own list of world records, with the main differences from the IAAF that the ARRS limits
record-quality courses to a start/finish separation of 30% (based on several rigorous technical studies) and that the ARRS does not accept intermediate times for road records (for several reasons that have been detailed in the Analytical Distance Runner in the past).
This is not meant to debate the relative merits of the two systems but rather to request information on the winning performances at the 20K championships so that the ARRS can recognize both of these as world records. Basically, all I need are the three stopped times taken for the first man (Tadesse) and the first woman (Kiplagat), as recorded to
tenths of seconds. Would it be possible to learn what the stopped times were for these two runners?
If I can be of assistance in supplying statistical information, please do not hesitate to ask. The ARRS database presently includes
information on more than 25,000 runners and includes more than 500,000 elite distance running performances.
Best wishes,
Ken Young
Association of Road Racing Statisticians
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