Although I not actually planning to compete against anyone else in the Malvern Midsummer Marathon, it seemed like a good idea to have a look at previous results to see what is a typical time (and the fastest) to gauge how difficult the course is to a normal road marathon.

I found on the internet the results from the 2011 and 2012 Malvern Midsummer Marathons. From these some analysis is possible on the ratio of “walkers” to “runners” (1.23 and 1.36 for the two years respectively), the number of retirements (eleven in each year) and the distribution of finishing times.

The following shows the distribution of finish times (binned in 30 minute chunks) for the two years. The peaks in the distributions for both years lie between 7 and 9 hours.

This particular marathon actually has two starts, one for walkers and one for runners, staggered one hour apart. Binning the data according to start time allows us to see the differences in performance between “runners” and “walkers”.

Now we can see that running finishers peak between 7 and 7 1/2 hours and walkers between 8 1/2 and 9 hours with a very long tail.

Finally, a normalised plot of cumulative finishers (below) lets us see what time might be required if for example, there was a desire to be in the top half of finishers then a time better than between 8 and 8 1/2 hours is required and therefore an average speed of 3.25 mph. Achieving this should be possible with a steady pace, although there would not be much possibility of stops for food etc. with between about 10 and 20 percent of walkers achieve this feat.

So what is my target? I would certainly like to be in the top 50%, but the comparison of the two years indicates that how achievable this is will probably depend as much on the split between walkers and runners as my own performance.