What is each course’s pacing fingerprint?
Courses have distinct recorded pacing profiles. Choose a city to see where runners tend to speed up or slow down relative to their own average.
Individual split profiles are available for 28 cities with at least 100 eligible finishes each.
How we measured it. Compute individual section pace relative to each runner’s full-marathon average, then take the median by city and section. Every checkpoint within a city uses the same complete-record cohort.
Full methodology & sources
Cities pool available race editions. Terrain, weather, field composition and route changes are not separated. Course-profile validity years are absent from CORE, so historical elevation has not been assigned to these runners.
Use complete, strictly increasing elapsed checkpoints at 3.11, 6.21, 9.32, 12.43, 15.53, 18.64, 21.75, 24.85 and 26.22 mi. Clock strings must parse as H:MM:SS or M:SS. No missing splits are interpolated.
Remove exact duplicate race records, ignoring database IDs, ingestion timestamps and source URLs. Retain finishes from 90 minutes to 12 hours with every section between 3.22 and 32.19 minutes/mi. These quality filters can exclude genuine unusual performances; the analysis describes this eligible cohort, not every entrant.
Each observation is a race finish. The same person can appear in multiple races. No runner identities are linked across races. Public cells require at least 100 observations; matched comparisons additionally require at least 20 per group in each stratum.
Apply the reviewed source-quality edition exclusions for this exact export after the timing checks. Known invalid split grids, incomplete ingestion, unreconciled HOLD editions and a selected top-finisher field do not contribute to the analyses or prior benchmarks. Report source exclusions separately; an already invalid timing row is not counted twice. Missing age or recorded gender alone does not exclude an otherwise eligible finish from the overall cohort. Other sparse editions are not declared incomplete merely from their size.
Pace through the selected course
Pace difference (%) · higher is slower
Points average the preceding section. The final section is 24.85–26.22 mi; lines do not locate pace changes within a section.
Every runner is normalized before aggregation. This is an observed city profile, not an elevation-adjusted pacing prescription.
View exact values and sample sizes
| Course section | Pace through the selected course | Observations |
|---|---|---|
| 0–3.11 mi | -7.4% | 712,178 |
| 3.11–6.21 mi | -8% | 712,178 |
| 6.21–9.32 mi | -6.1% | 712,178 |
| 9.32–12.43 mi | -3.5% | 712,178 |
| 12.43–15.53 mi | 1.7% | 712,178 |
| 15.53–18.64 mi | 0.6% | 712,178 |
| 18.64–21.75 mi | 7.8% | 712,178 |
| 21.75–24.85 mi | 9.5% | 712,178 |
| 24.85–26.22 mi | 4.4% | 712,178 |