Well...somewhere along the way we lost our mojo for a maintaining a Half Marathon Trainers group race calendar with race results...but there's a neat reporting feature in the RA groups which shows races logged by group members -- I had some downtime and pulled that data into a few graphs for a preliminary glimpse into the 2016 racing efforts of the intrepid racers in our group...

The data driving this is through a few days ago. It's the results from all members of the group -- not just active, or semi-active group members.

First up, let's take a look at the races everyone ran. After filtering the data to the 'standard' race distances (5k,5mi,10k,10mi,half,full), the 5KM and Half Marathon top the list, both at about 1/3 of the total. Was good to see the 10KM in 3rd; it's a great training race for the 1/2 marathon:

Looking at the months most popular for racing...this data slice usually surprises me...primarily because of how strong the April + May months dominate vs. Sept + Oct:

(There were 6 or 7 races logged with no date assigned, so I looked up the ones I could based on the race name...and tagged the rest as having happened on 1-11-2016: this means the January race count is inflated.)

When we take the 'by month' distribution and narrow it down to only half marathons...spring events in April + May and then Oct really stand out:

For the half marathons logged, how do our finish times fall out?  1:45 - 2:00 and 2:15 - 2:30 dominate. Looks like folks really drop the hammer to aim for sub-2 and sub-2:30:

Keep up the good racing folks!  Final update coming sometime in January.  Also, race name of the year and other arbitrary imaginary awards.

I'm a sucker for data! Thanks for putting this together MT

I put in one of those sub-2 half marathons as a training run. Out for blood and gunning for sub-1:40 in 2017! I haven't had a truly good race at any distance yet this year, but I have a 5 miler coming up that I'm feeling decent about and that will be a PR no matter what, and a TBD (but probably shorter - my true love is the 5K) race coming up in December.

 

+1! I'm not ready to sum up 2016, as I plan to toe the starting line of my first full soon.

WohooO! What race?

 

+1! I'm not ready to sum up 2016, as I plan to toe the starting line of my first full soon.

Hope you had a good race this weekend!

MT, great report. I really enjoy these year end stats!

There wasn't any real HM training for me with my continued decrease and low mileage. I will most likely end the year with a little less than 700 miles. I am only running 1-3 days per week and not following any plan. I just try to get in an easy run of 5-7, then a LR in the 10 mile range, and every once in a while, I'll do a hard tempo run.

I ended up doing 18 "races" for the year with 2 HM, 1 trail HM(11 miles), 1 7k, 1 8k, and the rest were 5k's. All of my races were pushing with Ainsley's Angels except the trail HM.

I had two milestones for the year that I am super proud of and are worth noting. First, I pushed one of our special needs riders for a sub 2 HM with a time of 1:58:23. The other HM that I pushed was a respectable 2:04:42. And secondly, although it wasn't an official race, I did a virtual race for Ainsley and recorded the HM distance for a PR time of 1:51:10.

I find that not trying to run 5-6 days per week, and always training for that "next race" has helped my body stay injury free. I will continue running 10-20 mile weeks with the random 25-28 mile weeks. I do plan to increase my mileage just a bit, keeping it to no more than 3 days per week, and will be "training", for the Little Rock Marathon on March 5. I'll be running this race in memory of my FIL, that passed away back in May.

Together We Shall