[fwipsy]

I cracked up when I got to the marathon example. When I ran a half marathon I realized about 80% of the way through that I was on track to finish under 2:30:00 and pushed myself to make it happen. I should have guessed that sort of behavior would show up in the statistics!

[chantepierre]

After this year's Paris marathon, I ran the same per-minute graphs, and they match perfectly the "overall study" graphs with more than 9 million finishes in the article. I also added graphing by age category and gender. I don't want to deduce too much but I think it showed that young men are the most "competitive" (what I mean by that is targeting a specific time) since there are the clearest "goal time" peaks in the graphs.

[brightbeige]

IIRC There is also a discontinuity when it comes to the histogram of ages of marathon runners, because runners are binned into age groups and there is a more runners at the youngest ages of each group, I guess because it’s younger runners in each group that are more likely to run if they feel more likely to place well in their group