Marathon Pace Improvements over 2007

I had fun analyzing a years Garmin data today - in a geeky engineer kinda way. Results show an average 4.5 second per mile per month improvement in my marathon pace.

Here's how I looked at the data. Runs were selected from the year of running that were steady fast paced - not too fast - from ~10 mile race pace to a little slwer than Marathon Pace'd runs. Only runs with good heartrate data were used - remove unrepresentative miles like the first mile or two. All runs were normalized based on data from my progressive runs - i.e. 3 seconds adjustement per 1 bpm off my target marathon heartrate (164).

Of course the trend cannot be expected to continue at the same rate - but what if it did:

Houston 2008 - 6:14 mpm (2:43)

Boston Marathon 2008 - 6:00 mpm (2:37)

Houston 2009 - 5:20 mpm (2:30)

World Record Achieved - September 2009 4:45 mpm (2:04)

John.