Question 13

What would your time be on another course?

Among 6,374 linked Boston–Chicago race pairs, Chicago finishes averaged 0.6 minutes slower after equally weighting the two race orders. Fitness, weather and selection still differ; this is not a personal equivalent-time forecast.

These are observed time differences across consecutive recorded races, not a personalized equivalent-time calculator.

85,672 linked race pairs · partial comparison

How we measured it. Use consecutive linked races in different calendar years, at most three years apart, with one recorded eligible race in each endpoint year. For each course pair, calculate the mean destination-minus-origin finish time separately for runners taking each race order, then average those two means equally.

Full methodology & sources

Require at least 20 pairs in each order and at least 100 overall. Balancing order reduces simple order imbalance but cannot remove fitness, weather, aging, motivation or entry-selection effects. The same runner can supply more than one pair. Positive means a slower finish at the destination.

For explicitly audited canonical-ID releases, validate unique matching CORE/FULL ID sets and matching recorded edition/name labels, then join by record ID with matching finish and all nine section durations. Legacy exports retain the one-to-one edition, trimmed lowercase name and full-timing join because their IDs are incompatible. Durations are compared to milliseconds. Keep only supplied non-ambiguous runner identities without conflicting recorded gender, inferred birth years spanning more than two years, or duplicate editions. These are candidate cross-race identities, not independently verified people; unlinked runners are absent. The linkage audit records which join was used.

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.

Full source records are available in public GitHub Releases. These chart tables require at least 100 eligible observations per cell for estimate reliability. Counts refer to finishes, linked pairs or event observations as specified in that answer.

These are observational results. Fitness changes, intentions, training, selection into the dataset and unmeasured conditions can explain differences. Outcome percentiles describe variation among performances, not confidence intervals or advice about the best strategy.

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.

Marathons, years and recorded data. Chart samples may be smaller than the eligible analysis cohort.

Observed time difference at the destination

Minutes

Amsterdam3.7 min
Berlin1.8 min
Chicago0.6 min
Copenhagen2.4 min
Gold Coast4.2 min
London-1.4 min
Madrid8.7 min
Rotterdam-4.2 min
Valencia-7 min
View exact values and sample sizes
GroupObserved time difference at the destinationObservations
Amsterdam3.7 min283
Berlin1.8 min1,189
Chicago0.6 min6,374
Copenhagen2.4 min666
Gold Coast4.2 min458
London-1.4 min3,269
Madrid8.7 min207
Rotterdam-4.2 min243
Valencia-7 min897

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