Lance Armstrong's NYC Marathon Performances and Expectations for Boston - Part 2

As I mentioned in my last post, Lance Armstrong is planning to run the Boston Marathon in April to raise money for his foundation. In that post I looked at Lance's performances in the 2006 and 2007 New York City Marathons. Lance made a very substantial improvement to his marathon time in 2007. He took almost 13 minutes off his time to finish with a time of 2:46:43.

How Many Sub-3 Runners Can Take 13 Minutes Off Their Times?

I thought it would be interesting to see how other runners who finished in under 3 hours in the 2006 New York City Marathon did in 2007. Do most improve their times? And by how much do they improve? As I mentioned in my previous post, the temperatures at both marathons were close. So this should be a good comparison. The main factor influencing times should be the runners themselves.

I gathered the finish times of the sub-3 runners from both years using the data at at Marathonguide.com. I then developed a program to look for repeat runners. The program recorded the repeat runners, computed the differences in times, and categorized the times into groups. The results are shown in the following table.

Repeat Sub-3 Runners in the 2006 and 2007 New York City Marathons

Minutes Slower	# of Runners	% of Runners	Lance's Improvement
20 to 15	2	1%	.
15 to 10	12	8%	.
10 to 5	24	16%	.
5 to 0	50	33%	.
Minutes Faster	# of Runners	% of Runners	Lance's Improvement
0 to 5	44	29%	.
5 to 10	13	8%	.
10 to 15	6	4%	12:53 improvement
15 to 20	1	1%	.
20 to 25	1	1%	.
Total	153	100%	.

As you can see from the table, my program identified 153 sub-3 repeat runners in the 2007 and 2006 NYC marathons. Out of these 153 runners, about 58% finished with slower times in 2007. Only about 6% of the runners finished in 2007 with times that were faster by 10 minutes or more. As you can see, Lance's time reduction of almost 13 minutes is part of this 6%. Below is the list of runners in this group:

Minutes Faster : Name             :  2006 Time    2007 Time
in 07 vs 06
10:30         : PIOTR KARASIEWICZ :    2:48:53,     2:38:23
12:28         : OSCAR HERNANDEZ   :    2:56:56,     2:44:28
12:48         : ALFONSO POLANIA   :    2:59:28,     2:46:40
12:53         : LANCE ARMSTRONG   :    2:59:36,     2:46:43
14:21         : SAM HILL          :    2:43:49,     2:29:28
14:28         : MARCELLO CRETTI   :    2:55:37,     2:41:09
15:16         : ERIC BOUCHER      :    2:57:02,     2:41:46
20:33         : STUART BURTON     :    2:52:08,     2:31:35

Lance had the fifth best time improvement for runners who ran under 3 hours in 2006. As mentioned in this Marathon You Can Do It blog post, it took Lance 4 or 5 months to recover from shin problems after the 2006 marathon. Lance said he was better prepared in 2007 so that must have been a major factor.

With Lance's physical capabilities I would expect him to continue to improve as long as he is able to train and stay healthy. As this Running Advice and News blog post describes, a prediction for his Boston race isn't easy. But I'll guess he'll finish in under 2:40.

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