This Saturday morning institution produces a huge amount of data. I tried to retrieve the (subjectively) most interesting numbers and here's what I found.
So double-knot your laces and let me show you the ins and outs of running your weekly 5k.
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| Source: Keswick Parkrun archive |
Before we move on, one thing to clarify. Parkrun needs you to have your own unique barcode to record your time. If you are unable to present a barcode, the position you finished at is filled as 'unknown' and no time is allocated for this position.
For a purpose of this analysis, where a winner was such John Doe, I used the fastest known time as the winning time (while the winner's initials of are still 'Unknown').
To date, 303 Parkruns have taken place in Keswick, with the number of parkrunners being as few as 54 or as numerous as a party of 500 during the New Year's Parkrun of 2019.
With Keswick being a highly touristy and seasonal town, I expected to see significant peaks and valleys periodically every 52 events and while the seasonality isn't quite as visible as I believed, looking at rolling average, the patterns clearly emerge: high summers and low winters with X-mas and New Year Parkruns becoming increasingly popular.
On average, every week 149 runners cross the finish line, of which there are 65 ladies and 74 gentlemen. If you can't figure out how 65 + 74 = 149, that's because it doesn't. The remaining 10 account for those non-barcoded runners shrouded in mystery.
It's not too unusual, however, for ladies to beat the men in numbers as out of 303 Parkruns this happened 51 times. The most significant powerplay occurred when 79 women were accompanied by only 51 men.
On average 22 runners beat their personal best and 7 speedos finish under 20 minutes every week.
The age distribution is fairly similar in both the male and female field, Parkrun seems to be popular with people aged 40+.
The most entries from the men were in the 50-54 age bracket (followed by 45-49 and 55-59). For the ladies it was the 45-49 (followed by 50-54 and 40-44). Please note these are not unique entries, so had someone entered all Parkruns, they would've been counted 303 times.
The event has been completed 44 times by John M. in 90-94 category.
If your aim is to finish in the first half of the field, you should aim for a time better than 27:37, that will get you there during an average Parkrun.
However, if you're going for a win, you should get those legs up to speed and aim for 17:44. That of course might not be enough as the record stands at 15:29 (Sam S.).
The event has been so far won by a woman 5 times (Rosie S., Sarah T., Hayley C., Rebecca R. and Emily R.).
Although the sample is small, the ladies winning time is on average half a minute slower than the gents: 18:11 vs. 17:38.
The event has also been twice won by a runner in 11-14 age category (Nathan S. and Robin R.) and once in 55-59 category (Greg P.).
31 athletes won Keswick Parkrun more than once, the big 3 being Sam S. (42 wins), Mark L. (31) and Carl B. (13).
Keswick Parkrun has recently changed venue from a scenic out-and-back gravel course along the river with a juicy climb in both directions to a flat tarmac path in a local park.
Going through the archives I estimated this change to have happened from event #274.
Strangely enough, the overall average time is 21 seconds slower after the change, however the winning times have improved by 22 seconds.
One question I was asking myself is whether the number of people attending has an effect on the average finishing time.
My thought here was that Parkruns with more runners would be on average slower as the less attended events would consist mostly of hard-core athletes ready to brave the elements.
However, when I looked at a graph comparing the number of runners with the average time, it turned out that events with more runners tend to be more, well, average!
You can clearly see that while quiet events tend to go both ways (faster and slower), the more attended events tend to gravitate towards the average finishing time (28:30).
Notice on the very top, the huge New Years Party with 500 runners saw average time of 28:59 - not a bad going with 3 hours of sleep, ey?
And last but not least, what is a good friendly race without a sprint finish.
For a purpose of our Saturday morning shake-out, I looked at the difference between the first 2 known times.
If the gap was 2 seconds or less, I classified it as a "sprint finish".
Out of 303 events, this has occurred 35 times, out of which 19 were "super sprints" when the gap was less than a second.
That's something Keswick Parkrunners might want to work on if they want to get an attention of international press.
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