The 55th Lincoln Presidential Half-Marathon

Last summer I picked up running. Despite my repeated assurances that I was keeping things light and would stick to training for races at the 5-10k distance, I recently ran the 55th Lincoln Presidential Half Marathon. It went really well. I ran my race and was incredibly happy with the end result.

I was also happy to see that It’s Race Time makes the results of the race available for download because I do love to go full data geek on things like this. So without further ado, here’s the 55th Lincoln Presidential Half-Marathon by the numbers.

Race Demographics

The race officially sold out and 1332 runners show up in the data set. Women ruled the day. There were nearly 200 more women out there hitting the road then there were men. The average runner seemed to be in their late 30s (represent!) or their 40s.

Below you see a more fine grained look at the ages represented at the race. The y-axis is labeled with the minimum and maximum counts along with the 25th, 50th and 70th percentiles to give you some sense of the spread of ages. You can clearly see that the most represented age group was the 45 year old runners with 57 total runners claiming this age.

Race Times

Hopefully everyone that came out and ran felt good about their run. While just showing up and giving it your best is worthy of praise, it’s hard to not want to see how fast people were going and how you stack up. Below you’ll see box plots for each age group. The triangles indicate the mean time for the group.

If we group times by the minute we can get a pretty good look at the overall distribution of race times. On the fast end you see the winner with a blistering 1:05 finish. A big cluster of runners were coming in a hour after that and finishing around the 2:20 minute mark. The overall mean was about 2:24 with a median time around 2:19. The full distribution of times is a hefty image so you might need or want to open it in its own tab in order to zoom in and out.

What Next

It’s pretty busy this time of year and this was just the low hanging fruit of what I might tease out of the race data. I might take a deeper dive when the spring semester wraps up. If you’re interested in seeing something else or want to start poking around with the data set on your own feel, then free to reach out to me. Thanks to the Springfield Road Runners Club for making my first half-marathon a lot of fun (not those hills at the end though…not cool) and thanks to It’s Race Time for making the race data available for us data geeks.