Tag Archives: Statistics

Jantastic January

Jantastic

I mentioned previously that I had signed up for the Jantastic challenge. Jantastic was set up last year by former international runner Martin Yelling (husband of Olympian marathoner, Liz Yelling) and Tom Williams, MD of parkrun, who co present the MarathonTalk podcast. In Martin’s own words

Jantastic is a New Year fitness challenge and it grew out of our desire to offer motivation and encouragement to runners as they strive for consistency towards their spring running goals.

The challenge runs for 3 months and the set up is simple: in the first month, set a target number of workouts you will aim to complete each week. In the second month, you still set a target number of workouts but also add a distance target for a single run each week. In March, the final month, you add a time target for a single run – something to aim for after hopefully completing 3 months of training, inspired and motivated by taking part in the challenge.
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Bad Altitude

Sarah Wilde wrote a very honest post about her experience this weekend running the EnduranceLife UTSW60 that ran this weekend. It’s a shame to hear that she felt the overall experience of the race was lacking owing to poor communication, organisation and lacklustre checkpoints. Which is a shame. She also highlighted an apparent discrepancy in the advertised total ascent of the course against what her Garmin showed (14000ft vs 6900ft). Which figure should she trust?

Via the wonderful medium of Twitter, I gave her a link to Andy Cole’s blog post about the issues with Garmin’s elevation calculations and, Andy being a gent with an engineering background (and the ability to make some very pretty graphs), it’s a useful and insightful post.

Last night, after a running a few laps of a local field (complete with hills) and a subsequent conversation with Sarah on Twitter, I thought I’d do some analysis of the run and some data comparisons of my own. Ready for this? Don’t worry, there are some pretty pictures. Well, graphs.
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The Other 90%: Lakeland 100 DNFs

This post marks the first of a new series I’ll be calling The Other 90% in reference to the common saying that exercise is 10% physical and 90% mental.

With the clock ticking away the hours and minutes and there only being five and a half weeks left until the UTLD100, I’ve decided to revisit last years performance and start some mental preparation. After reading my blogpost about what went wrong, I decided to look at the results and my timings. I noticed that the section from Howtown (CP9) to Mardale Head (CP10), where I pulled out, took me 4h17m to complete. The section is a toughie, no doubt about it; at 9.4 miles it’s the second longest section and it’s got the highest ascent with 765m – all on the big climb up Wether Hill. It took me 4 hours and 17 minutes to complete. Ouch!

Out of curiosity, I checked how long it took the 100th place finisher to complete that section (I chose 100th because I arrived at Mardale Head in 101st place). He did it in 3h28m. The chap who I arrived at Dockray with, Philip, completed it in 3h29m, Andy Cole (who I bumped into at Dalemain) did it in 3h35m and Mick Wren completed it in 3h31m. Compared to all these finishers, I took 45-50 minutes longer on the Mardale section. That got me thinking.
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