Anatomy of a Positive Split

Bear with me as I exercise my instinctual geek love of numbers. If I could find a way to bathe in a percolating hot tub of statistics, I would do so. The more numbers to the right of the decimal, the better (and I find the numbers in the hundredths position really cleanse the under carriage). I look at statistics these days the same way I used to look at the Farrah Fawcett poster on the back of my bedroom door.*

I’ve spent a few posts recently outlining my marathon strategy because (a) I knew you were dying to read about it and (b) it was a convenient way to mock Vanilla and Viper and their ridiculous negative split strategy and (c) there wasn’t a better way to reference the Revolutionary War ass whooping Washington laid on lethargic, overconfident General Cornwallis. And who doesn’t like a Cornwallis reference with their morning coffee?

When reviewing my Detroit Marathon splits, you can see a well developed positive split in full effect. This positive split is so well developed that it might as well be called the Nitmos Split. If that wasn’t obvious enough, what I’m saying is that I’m well developed. The War of Posts against stubborn General “Cramp” Cornwallis becomes obvious in those post 20 miles.

My Garmin could not get a satellite signal before the race. I didn’t fight it too hard as I figured it would probably lose signal in the underwater tunnel anyhow. So, I hit the lap button at most mile markers. Those markers I missed are averaged across the mile splits and shown in italics.

Behold a steadily declining pace:

Mile/Pace

1 6:53
2 6:53
3 7:03
4 7:48 (Ambassador Bridge going up)
5 6:41 (Ambassador Bridge going down)
6 6:48
7 7:12
8 7:12
9 7:12 (somewhere in here the tunnel down/up happened)
10 7:12
11 7:04
12 7:06
13 7:10
14 7:13
15 7:13
16 7:16
17 7:23
18 7:17
19 7:21
20 7:41 (First signs of a twitchy calf and reactionary easing of pace)
21 7:34
22 7:39
23 7:40 (Notice how I’m bleeding seconds every mile since 21??)
24 7:52
25 8:10
26 8:13 (Miles 21-26 = War of Posts and the defeat of the marathon!)
.22 1:44

This is one steady decline in pace. If charted, it would go up from start to finish almost in a straight line except for a flat part in the middle.

You might think this was a long way to go to compare myself to George Washington again. It’s true I am a lot like George Washington but considerably more developed (remember previous discussion above?) Besides the obvious though, you can see that, once again, I chose to completely ignore my pre-race strategy to run easy for the first 5 miles in the 7:20 range, pick it up to 7:10 miles until about the 16 mile mark and then settle back into a 7:20 to 7:30 range from there on out and as long as I could. Basically, this rabid cheetah took off all hopped up on high energy adrenaline and completely ignored the carefully considered race plan.

Those two 8 minute miles really stick in my crawl. They cost me my PR and, really, I felt pretty good coming down the home stretch to post those numbers. I think I coasted in not wanting to blow the race out due to recurring nightmares of knotted legs and staggering to finish in my recent past. I blame Cornwallis and the British if you want to know the truth.

So, there you go, if you don’t have enough numbers from your own Garmin to ogle…to love…and caress…and, well, whatever your fancy, feel free to make sweet analysis on my numbers. I’ve been soaking in this statistical bath for a few days now. I’m going to try to ween off of it by reading a baseball almanac over the weekend.

Happy trails.

* I always thought nerdy Kate Jackson was the cute one but they never made posters of her.
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So that you know, the Parents defeated the Kids in the annual grudge/soccer match 6-5. My colt had 2 goals despite my best efforts to slide tackle into his ankles. This was the first running I did since the marathon and it was painful. Yes, of course, I also scored 2 goals (thankyouverymuch) but, since the format of the game was a Parent would play goal for the Kids team and vice versa, I ended up letting in the winning Parent goal. So, shame on me. The full box score is as follows:

Parents 6
Kids 5
Broken Tibias 0
Parents with Pulled Hamstrings 2

My filly also played on the side of the Parents team. I didn’t think she would be allowed to play so she showed up wearing sparkly gray slipper shoes. With every kick, a sparkly gray shoe flew into the air. She might have had difficulty running around the field but, with just a few clicks of the ankle, she could have transported to Kansas on a moments notice!