PACING STRATEGY OF THE FINISHERS OF THE WORLD MARATHON MAJORS SERIES

Authors

  • Ülari Kais Institute of Sport Sciences and Physiotherapy, University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia
  • Kerli Mooses Institute of Sport Sciences and Physiotherapy, University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia
  • Rasmus Pind Institute of Sport Sciences and Physiotherapy, University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia
  • Ando Pehme Institute of Sport Sciences and Physiotherapy, University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia
  • Priit Kaasik Institute of Sport Sciences and Physiotherapy, University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia
  • Martin Mooses Institute of Sport Sciences and Physiotherapy, University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia

Abstract

The purpose of the study was to describe pacing patterns of the finishers of the World Marathon Majors series and the effect of sex and age on the pacing pattern. The finishers of the World Marathon Majors series, a total of 69 814 male runners and 46 856 female runners with finishing time ≤ 6 hours were included in the analysis. Difference in pacing (dev%) was calculated as a difference between the first and second half of the marathon and expressed as a percentage of time. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to evaluate the differences within and between the marathon time groups. The differences between the first and second half of the marathon by sex and age group were analysed using linear regression. The average difference between the first and second half of the marathon was 3.44±2.67% for male and 2.81±2.10% for female runners. Male runners with finishing times of 3:00 (h:min) and females with 4:00 (h:min) or slower had the significantly faster first half of the marathon compared to the evenly paced marathon (p=.038 and p=.001, respectively). Regression analysis revealed that female runners had 0.26% smaller difference between the first and second half of the race compared to male runners (R2=0.256; p<.001) when controlled for age and time group. Also, veterans (40 years and older) paced more evenly compared to non-veterans (R2=0.256; p<.001). In conclusion, irrespective of sex and age, faster finishers maintain a more constant velocity than the slower ones. In addition, women and veterans present more even pacing strategy compared to men and non-veterans, respectively.

Key words: distance running, recreational runners, pacing

Downloads

Published

2018-08-31

How to Cite

Kais, Ülari, Mooses, K., Pind, R., Pehme, A., Kaasik, P., & Mooses, M. (2018). PACING STRATEGY OF THE FINISHERS OF THE WORLD MARATHON MAJORS SERIES. Kinesiology, 51(1), 22–27. Retrieved from https://hrcak.srce.hr/ojs/index.php/kinesiology/article/view/7384

Issue

Vol. 51 No. 1 (2019)

Section

Articles

License

Copyright (c) 2018 Kinesiology

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

At Faculty of Kinesiology we recognize that access to quality research is vital to the scientific community and beyond. Kinesiology is non-profit journal and all costs of publishing and peer review process are covered by the publisher itself or other funding sources like Ministry of Science and Education of the Republic of Croatia.   Full text papers are also available free of charge at http://hrcak.srce.hr/kineziologija. There are no restrictions on self archiving of any form of paper (preprint, postprint and publisher's version). 

Articles are distributed under the terms of the CC BY - NC 4.0

Kinesiology does not charge any fees to authors to submit or publish articles in our journal.