Last week, I put together an analysis showing the average marathon times of runners throughout the United States in 2024. A question tangential to that analysis was how the average finish times changed from 2023 to 2024.
Specifically, as I’ve analyzed data for the Boston Marathon Cutoff Tracker, I’ve noticed that a slightly higher percentage of runners are meeting their qualifying times. The big changes are being driven by growth in the field – but minor changes are also happening within the distribution of finish times.
So I thought it would be interesting to take a quick look at those distributions as a whole. In the average marathon time article, I just looked at how the averages changed.
In that article, I also took a look at the normalized distribution of marathon times in 2024. So the logical next step is to whip up another visual showing how that distribution changed from 2023 to 2024. And that’s exactly what we’ve got below.
How did Women’s Marathon Times Change From 2023 to 2024?
For more details on the data, I’ll refer you back to the original article on average marathon times. But this visual represents a large sample of ~100,000 women who finished marathons in the United States. This subset has also been narrowed down to runners 20-39 – to eliminate the confounding nature of age.
The x-axis stretches from 2:00 to 8:00, and each minute on the graph shows the percentage of all runners who finished in that one minute span. When you see 3:59 on the graph, that covers the span of finish times from 3:59:00 to 3:59:59.
If you’re having trouble reading the embedded graph, you can click through to see the original on Flourish. It’s a little larger.
Overall, the lines track fairly similarly and the distribution doesn’t change by a lot. But there are a few key areas with noticeable differences.
The biggest discrepancies are probably around the 3:30, 4:00, and 4:30 points.
In 2023, there is a small spike at 3:00 and a bigger one at 3:30 – with a higher percentage of women finishing around those times in 2023. Although it’s worth pointing out that the overall number of runners increased dramatically – so there are more actual women finishing in this range in 2024.
Further to the right, though, there’s a sustained increase in the graph from 3:45 to 4:00 and another one from 4:15 to 4:30. In both cases, the percentage of women finishing at these times is higher in 2024 – and with the increased number of runners the absolute numbers are much higher.
The converse, then, must be true. If a relatively greater proportion of women are finishing in the 3:30 to 5:00 time frame, relatively fewer are finishing out beyond 5:00. And indeed, the blue line is slightly higher throughout most of the right tail of the distribution.
Here’s a zoomed in version that just focuses on 2:30 to 5:30. It cuts off the right tail of the distribution, but you can see the differences better.
When we zoom in here, it’s a lot easier to see where the purple line is higher. And from around 3:45 to 5:00, it’s higher at most points on the graph. There are some small variations here and there, and that noise is to be expected when you take this down to the one minute interval.
But considering the facts that a) there are far more women in the sample in 2024, b) a higher proportion of those women are finishing faster than 5:00, and c) a higher proportion of women in 2023 finished slower than five hours … there are a lot of women joining the sport and bumping up the average finish time.
The numbers at the fast end – up to around the BQ point of 3:30 – aren’t changing much, though. The big changes for women are happening in that faster end of the middle part of the distribution.
How Did Men’s Marathon Times Change From 2023 to 2024?
And here’s the chart for men structured in the same way.
Similar to the women’s distribution, the very fast end of things often has the blue line slightly above the purple line. From around the 2:20 to 2:40 mark, a slightly higher proportion of men hit those times in 2023. But again, the field grew – so it’s often a similar number of runners.
From about 3:05 to 4:00, though, the purple line is consistently higher than the blue line. And it’s increased by quite a bit.
There’s a big jump around 3:30, and there’s a sustained increase from 3:40 to 4:00. The biggest increase is at 3:58, where the proportion of men finishing at that time is up almost 20%.
From 4:00 to 5:00, the distributions overlap a lot. And out on the long tail to the right, the purple line is consistently slightly lower than the blue line.
And here’s a zoomed in version, limiting the x-axis to 2:00 to 4:30.
This makes the increase in that 3:00 to 4:00 timeframe much more obvious.
Although at first glance, it looks like there’s no change from 2:45 to 3:00, remember that the overall field size is quite a bit larger. That part of the distribution is tall enough that even if the blue line is slightly higher – there are more actual runners in 2024 finishing at those times.
Similar to the women, I’d say that there’s been a big influx of men – and that these men are often finishing in the faster part of the middle of the distribution. The percentage of young men hitting their BQ (2:55 to 3:00) isn’t much higher, but the percentage hitting the better-than-average times of 3:30 and 3:45 is.
So How Have the Distribution of Finish Times Changed from 2023 to 2024?
If you’re looking at the fast end – around the Boston qualifying level – the distribution hasn’t changed much for men or women. Slightly higher percentages of runners finished at the extreme left end of the distribution in 2023, but the difference is small.
But in both cases, the faster-than-average segment grew considerably. Remember that the average finish time for young men is 4:06 and the average finish time for young women is 4:32. The left end of the interquartile range – the top 25% mark – is 3:31 for men and 3:55 for women.
So in both cases, it’s that 2nd quartile – the 25% to 50% mark – that’s growing quite considerably, while the 4th quartile (slowest 25% of runners) is shrinking.
Combine this with the fact that there is an influx of new runners, and I’d interpret this to mean that a) there are a lot of new runners, b) those runners are training hard, but c) these new runners are still new. While a small percentage of young runners pop onto the scene immediately able to run a Boston qualifying time, most people need at least a few cycles to get to that point.
The corollary to this is that these new runners are not slow. It’s certainly not the case that a bunch of new runners are entering the sport, half-assing their training, and walking it in at six hours.
Over the next couple of years, it’ll be interesting to see whether this cohort of runners remains this large and if these runners stick around. If they do, I’d expect to see these times start to shift to the left as they put in some additional years of training.
What do you think about the data in these visuals – and what do you think we can look forward to in the next few years?