What was my time? It was very bad, by the standards of people who run: 10:29/mile. By my standards, this is very, very good---not far off from what I ran in the single mile when I was in middle school but for much, much longer.
Anyway, I wanted to have some fun, so I grabbed the race results from a Web site and decided to do some analysis.
Table 1 displays the results of ordinary least-squares estimates of running times per mile for the participants in the Jingle All the Way 8K Race this morning. Scanty information is available, so the models are pretty spare. Nevertheless they do have some pretty strong results.
Table 1. OLS models of time per mile in seconds
for the Jingle All The Way Race, December 2011.
(1) | (2) | (3) | |
Overall | Men Only | Women Only | |
age | 1.642*** | 1.264*** | 1.955*** |
(11.52) | (5.84) | (10.29) | |
female | 78.24*** | ||
(25.03) | |||
_cons | 484.3*** | 497.8*** | 552.2*** |
(85.19) | (60.89) | (84.93) | |
N | 4726 | 1709 | 3017 |
t statistics in parentheses
* p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01, *** p < 0.001 |
As you can see, women are significantly--significantly--slower than men. For a runner of the same age, women are 78 seconds slower than men. Moreover, women slow down with age somewhat faster than men, losing nearly 2 seconds from their mile time for each year they get older. Compare that with men, who slow by only about 1.3 seconds per year.
I'm told that trendlines suggest that women are slightly better designed than men for running enormously long distances at a go—like 100+ miles. In other words, as the distance of a race increases, the better women do vis-à-vis men, though I don't know if we've found the point where they take the upper hand.
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