Finish times at the Orcas Island 25k

I had never run so far, or for so much time, in my life. When I crossed the finish line at the Orcas Island 25k in 3:42:48 (or 222.8 minutes), poured a beer and got in line for pizza, I was wondering how the finish times were distributed. I’d had lots of time to think while I was running for almost 4 hours, and since I had never done a race of that length across that type of terrain (check out the race photos by Glenn Tachiyama), I wasn’t sure how the other runners tended to finish.

When I saw the finish times posted, I made a few plots to look at this.

First I made a histogram of the finish times, with each bin showing the count of runners finishing in 10 minute intervals.

I had thought I was farther back, but my time of 222.8 was pretty close to the middle, and from the histogram I saw that the bulk of the field finished in 3 hours (180 minutes) to about 4 hours 40 minutes (280 minutes).

The histogram didn’t show a lot of detail, and a realized that a dotchart of each finish time might be an interesting way to look at these finish times. This dotchart shows the finish times of all 254 who completed the course.

This shows the finish times and places grouped by female or male.

And I made one more chart to find my finish within the field.

I was very much in the middle of the field. I was just glad to finish as fast as I did and to run through all that snow. The times of the top finishers were so fast. I was just coming down from the Powerline headed towards Twin Lakes when the leader crossed the finish line!