Wednesday 27 July 2016

North Downs Way 100 - 2015 - Pace analysis


I have crunched the 2015 NDW100 results to help me see what I need to do to get one of the coveted sub 24 buckles. I have 4 sub 24 finishes at the 100 mile distance so far but this one is more like 102.6...

Hopefully this will help you with getting an idea of pacing or give crew an idea of where you will be at certain points in the race. However 100 mile races are far from an exact science.

This is a graph of finish time vs splits - this is useful if you want to see what a typical split would be for your target finishing time. Regression lines are added to smooth through some of the statistical variation.



Next I rescaled the times e.g if someone finishes in 26 hours, then multiply all splits by 24/26. There is a bit of distortion around 24 hours due to the clustering of people chasing sub 24s (or taking it easy to make sure of the buckle) so this should help provide more data points than just looking at people who finished in roughly 24 hours. There is a very slight trend for more even pacing for the faster runners but it is very modest.

Finish position (x-axis) versus rescaled splits (y-axis)



 And finally here is a table of the rescaled splits above with percentiles.
 

I have also done this for some other Centurion races and there is a fairly consistent grouping of splits despite the very different profiles and race day conditions. My 10 hours to halfway for a sub 24 is a pretty good rule for all of the Centurion 100s.