Some stats from the men's Olympic Trials Marathon

I'm not going to offer any recap of the trials marathons, because there are dozens and dozens of awesome articles and photo galleries you can check out. Just head over to Letsrun.com and you'll be entertained for hours.

As everyone who watched / read knows, both races were incredible, and we are sending very strong teams to London this summer. It was cool to watch, but Andrea and I definitely felt like watching from home was not the way to experience the trials... it was exciting to be watching, but at the same time - very bittersweet. We want to be competing in 2016!

Being a total dork, I converted the mile-by-mile splits from the race website into a more usable spreadsheet. You can download it below. I've also made a few graphs. If time permits, I'll do this for the women's race as well.

Here is the google doc link for the Olympic Trials mile-by-mile splits spreadsheet. You'll want to download the original file and open it using Microsoft Excel, or else the formatting will be all jacked up.

For all of these graphs, the Y-axis is the mile split / pace, and the X-axis is the mile marker. The trials had timing mats at every mile, which is a stat geek's dream!

First up - here are the splits for the Top 20 finishers...

Now here are just the Top 4. You can see where Ritz lost it, around mile 20 - but he fought and clawed his way back in the last couple miles. 

Here are all the DNFs. While there were a few slow miles in there, most guys dropped out before they crossed that threshold into 6-minute mile land. They knew when the wheels were falling off.

This graph is similar to the first one, but just picks out some selected individuals. Paul Peterson, one of our fellow Fast Running Bloggers, was one of the few guys in the history of the marathon to slow down, and then manage to speed back up over the last 5K. Very impressive... he's a tough racer!

Here is what Paul said when I showed his these graphs: You can definitely see how the course was NOT flat, as some mile sets were consistently fast or slow (ie - Mile 8/16/24 are all the same stretch of road). The mile with the 180-uturn was 7/15/22, and those were all slow miles for everyone, etc. You can also see the utter carnage/chaos of the last last 6 miles pretty clearly...for everyone.

And finally, here's the average (+/- SD) splits for the entire field of finishers, versus just the top 10 finishers. I found it interesting that the "field" managed to kick it in over the last 0.2 relatively better than the top 10 guys :-)