Although much of what I write is freely available on this website, I tend to publish my data-intensive running articles on Medium – either in Runner’s Life or In Fitness and In Health.
These articles are time intensive to research and by publishing them there, I’m able to be compensated for my work. But the trade off is that these articles are then behind Medium’s paywall, and you would typically need to be a Medium subscriber to read them.
However, I do include one of these articles in the newsletter I send out each week. And if you leave your email address below, I’d be happy to send you a special link to a specific article.
Just use the dropdown menu below to pick the article that you’re interested in, and I’ll send you an e-mail with a special “Friend Link” from Medium. This will get you behind the paywall so that you can read the article without being a paid subscriber.
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Some Of My Most Popular Premium Articles on Medium
Let me give you some examples of what I’m talking about. Here are five of the most read articles that I’ve published on Medium.
They all involve a deep dive into data around marathons and/or scientific research into running.
No. American Runners Have NOT Never Been Slower.
This article is the final part of a lengthy series about trends in marathon times.
It was inspired by an article I read by Run Repeat that claimed that American marathoners had never been slower – hence the somewhat cheeky title. After collecting a massive dataset including millions of individual finishes over twenty years, I came to the conclusion that American runners have been getting faster in recent years.
There is a decline in average times through the 80’s and 90’s as participation in running increased. But since 2000, any perceived slowdown is merely a result of a shift in demographics. The average age of runners has increased along with the number of women. But when you disaggregate the data by age and gender, runners are trending towards faster times – especially since 2018 or 2019.
How Hot Is Too Hot to Run a Marathon?
This article looks at the academic research related to distance running and exertional heat stroke.
It was a long time coming. Since the Twin Cities Marathon was cancelled in 2023, I’ve been mulling this question over in my mind. Just how hot is too hot?
In the aftermath of that decision, there was a lot of chatter online – with some people heavily critical of the race officials for cancelling the race. After all, people routinely run in those hot conditions in certain parts of the world. So what’s the worst that could happen?
On the one hand, they’re right in that there is very little individual risk to running a marathon in hot weather. But on the other hand, it turns out there’s quite a bit of societal risk to hosting a large scale race on a hot, humid day. Even if only a small percentage of runners succumb to the heat and require medical attention, it can overrun the local medical infrastructure and ultimately cost other people their lives.
This was a really interesting topic to research – and I’ll be digging into it some more in the future.
How Will the New Chicago Marathon Qualifying Times Change Your Odds of Running the Race?
This article is an analysis of the new qualifying times introduced for the 2025 Chicago Marathon.
In June 2024, the Chicago Marathon announced that it would be reducing its qualifying times for next years race. This caused a flurry of discussion online about its ramifications and potential causes.
I relied on a dataset that I’d previously collected, including almost all individual marathon results from 2023, to assess how much harder these new times would make it to get into Chicago. It turns out it would cut the potential pool of qualified applicants by about 40%. However, these times also helped balance out the difficulty between different age groups since the previous qualifying times had made it much easier for some groups to earn guaranteed entry.
Which Is Harder: A Man Running a Marathon Under 3:00 or a Woman Under 3:30?
This article takes an empirical look at one of the age old questions – how do you compare race results between men and women?
These specific times (3:00 / 3:30) were chosen because they correspond to the current (2024) Boston qualifying times. And any time people talk about qualifying for Boston, someone has to suggest that women have an easier time qualifying than men. Some people (mostly men) seem to think that running a sub-3 marathon is much, much tougher.
So I looked at the results of races from 2010 to 2019 to see what percentage of men were able to finish under 3 hours and what percentage of women were able to finish under 3:30 … and they were more or less the same. There are some nuances in the data, and it’s worth a read. But the short version is that the two feats are roughly equivalent.
How Do You Compare Race Results Between Age Groups?
This article was the first in a series that led to the creation of this age grading calculator based on percentiles. It was inspired by a conversation I had with Amby Burfoot about the limitations of the current age grading system.
This original article lays out a few critiques of the current system – and it offers up two potential alternatives. These are percentiles and z-scores. I went on to collect two large datasets – one covering a sample of races 2010-2019 and another covering almost all races from 2023 – to create the tables necessary to calculate what percentile a given performance is at based on a runner’s gender and age.
This ended up being a ten part series that took two or three months to put together. But at the end, I’m happy with the calculator I was able to put together.
Is Summer Weather Really That Much Worse In Florida Than Up North?
This article compares summer weather in three locations – Newark, Chicago, and West Palm Beach.
It was inspired by a comment I read online last summer (2023) about how bad the heat was in New Jersey. Someone commented that it was worse in Florida, and an argument ensued. Hot is hot, right?
Well not really. It turns out that it is -typically – much more hot and humid in south Florida than in either Newark or Chicago. I know this first hand, because I routinely visit family in south Florida. And running there – especially in the summer – is torture. But now I’ve got the data to prove it.
Of course, this summer (2024) may prove to turn out differently. It has been extremely hot and humid in New Jersey, and much of the country has been engulfed in a heat wave from late June to early July. We’ve been dealing with the kinds of dew points that you usually only find in the southeastern United States.
When this summer is over, it’ll be interesting to do another comparison – and see how bad things really were.
What Would You Like to Know?
I’ve got lots of questions and I’m naturally curious. That’s part of what keeps me doing this kind of research and publishing the results in Medium.
But my list of questions isn’t endless. In fact, these questions are often inspired – directly or indirectly – with conversations I have with other people about running and running related topics.
So if there’s a specific question that you’ve been wondering about, leave a comment below. If I think it’s interesting, and if I can find some data to provide the necessary insight, I’ll dig in. I’m not afraid to go down a rabbit hole – or to collect a few million race results in order to do so.