Twenty-Six Miles through a Lake, Part III

Race statistics are like porn to runners, and Portland had no shortage of runner’s porn.

Starting off with the basics here's how I did:

Looking at these stats, Portland is actually now the best race I've run (on paper).  While I didn't get a PR I did finish in the top 18% of overall finishers, the only time I've done better than that was the Warrior Dash a few weeks back--and that wasn't really a running contest.  For Gender place, it's a tie with the Delaware Marathon at top 30%, and for age group it's my best Marathon performance by 1%.  I'm interpreting these numbers to mean that even that I may have been having a crappy day, everyone else was having a crappier day--which makes me feel better about the whole race.  It lets me know I didn't completely squander this easy course. 

I should note there are discrepancies between some of the reporting (finish time, number of runners, etc.) depending on where you get them from.  I went with the numbers on the results website since those appear to be the most robust.

The race also recorded quite a few split times.  I find this funny because the race didn't have clocks at the mile markers, but they did have timing mats to record splits.  I would think that you would want to provide clocks before providing splits.  Anywho, here's how I was pacing during various parts of the race, looks like I was doing pretty well (but notice there is no split for the final 5 miles):

It's pretty cool that the race provided all these stats.  Especially since it didn't register when I marked the finish on Fenny--the Garmin download says I ran for 36.7 miles in 7:21:15.  Even though I got every split on the course, I didn't get the most important one--despite race pictures showing me hitting my watch while I crossed the finish line!

In addition to the splits above, there were some cool graphics that the results website provided.  This first screen shows my placing in the various groups in a graph form.  But the coolest thing on this page is the box on the bottom right where it reports how many I passed (223!!) in the last 10K and how many people passed me (just 26?).  That's a huge ego boost.

This second screen has interesting ways of presenting my averages during the race (average mile, average kilometer, average speed).  There is also a diagram of the finish area when I crossed the finish line.  I have no idea how they did this, but it shows everyone that was immediately before and after me in the race.  And when you hover over those dots on the site, the name and time difference pops up underneath the dot.  Pretty freakin' cool.

This last screen is also interesting.  The map shows you 1) where you were when the overall winner finished, 2) where you were when the female winner finished, and 3) where the average runner was when you finished the race.  There's also that bar chart off to the right with average speed for each quarter of the race.  On the site if you hover over those numbers it provides the exact timing and distance for those splits.  Pretty cool.

Now that I've looked at the numbers I realize that things weren't that bad.  This was actually a good race.  The bitching and griping has to be done in order to come to the conclusion that the bitching and griping aren't all that necessary: I still conquered the Marathon (again!!) and I still ran my best.