by Joel Tetreault
One of the age old questions in track and field, or in any sport for that matter, is “at what age do you peak?” Obviously, from sport to sport there can be a wide range as some Olympic gymnasts peak in their teenage years or low 20’s, while the last four winners of the Olympic Individual Cycling Road Time Trial Men were all over 30. This question of “when does one peak?” is especially contentious for the marathon event. One school of thought says that since the marathon is such a grueling event, it requires one to be a very experienced runner and have many years of training under your belt to sustain the high mileage training necessary to be competitive. To some, the marathon is seen as an event that you move up to once you have achieved a certain performance in the 5,000m or 10,000m events, or are stagnating performance-wise. The other school of thought says not to wait too long to move up to the marathon and that one should put in the specific training for it as soon as possible.
In elite US marathoning these two schools of thought have both had successes and failures, making it hard to tease out which one could be called the better approach. American 10,000m/half-marathon standout Abdi Abdirahman had a big breakthrough in the marathon, running a personal record (PR) of 2:08:56 at the Chicago Marathon in 2006 at the age of 29. Mebrahtom Keflezighi won the silver medal at the Olympics in 2004, also at the age of 29. Both had focused primarily on shorter track distances in their 20’s. On the other hand, the Hansons’ Distance Project has had success the last two years taking guys who were decent NCAA Division 1 or Division 3 runners and developing them into marathoners in their early 20’s, just out of college. In the 2006 Chicago and Boston marathons, several of their athletes notched PR’s between 2:15 and 2:18.
On the world scene, the picture is further muddled. All the medalists in the Athens 2004 mens’ marathon were around 30: Gold medalist Stefano Baldini was 33, Meb was 29, and Brazilian bronze medalist Vanderlei Lima was 35. But for the three Olympics before that, nearly all the medalists were in their lower 20’s!
Looking at the top ten peformance list (see chart below), the three fastest marathon performances of all time were all run by guys 30 or older. However, there are some younger guys - Rutto, Limo, Munji, etc. who have run nearly as fast.
| Top 10 Men’s Marathon Performance List (All-Time) |
| |
NAME |
TIME |
AGE |
| 1. |
Paul Tergat |
2:04:55 |
34 |
| 2. |
Sammy Korir |
2:04:56 |
31 |
| 3. |
Khalid Khannouchi |
2:05:38 |
30 |
| 4. |
Evans Rutto |
2:05:50 |
25 |
| 5. |
Haile Gebrselassie |
2:05:56 |
33 |
| 6. |
Ronaldo da Costa |
2:06:05 |
28 |
| 7. |
Felix Limo |
2:06:14 |
23 |
| 8. |
Titus Munji |
2:06:15 |
23 |
| 9. |
Moses Tanui |
2:06:16 |
34 |
| 10. |
Daniel Njenga |
2:06:16 |
26 |
Given only this quick perusal of statistics, it is hard to draw any conclusions of at what age an elite athlete peaks, and thus whether an early marathon-specific approach is better than a later development approach. In this article, we look at the complete Olympic medalist data for the marathon, as well as the ages of marathoners who have run under 2:10:30 for the marathon, to investigate the following questions:
- Are younger runners more likely to medal in the Olympic marathon than older ones? What is the average age of an Olympic marathon medalist?
- Is there a trend (increasing or decreasing) over the last 100 years of Olympics for athletes of a certain age to be more likely to medal?
- At what age is someone most likely to PR in the marathon? (What is the average age that an elite marathoner PR’s?)
- Are there any trends over the decades regarding this average age? (Maybe runners from the 1950s were more likely to PR in their later years, rather than runners now)
- Being more specific, what is the average PR age of top level marathoners per country? (Do successful marathon countries have guys that are older or younger than the norm?)
To be clear, this article is meant simply as an exploration of statistics, not an exhaustive investigation to determine the “perfect age” for a marathoner. That kind of investigation would have to take into a lot of factors, such as athlete background, previous injuries, etc. So to go back to the original contentious issue of when to develop someone into marathoner, it is a hard question to answer decisively with this investigation, even with a lot of statistics to look at! But the hope is to shed some light on whether this is a worthwhile question to ask in the first place - even if the evidence continues to be muddled.
Disclaimer out of the way, let’s start answering some of the questions! This will be presented in two parts - one for male marathon statistics, and after that, one for female marathon statistics.
Male Marathon Statistics
Ages of Olympic Medalists
For the first question we look at data extracted from the Olympic Database, which is an online database of all medalists in Olympic events. To answer the first question, I took all marathon medalists per Olympic Game, averaged their ages and plotted it below.
(click on graph for larger image)
Averaging the ages of all medalists from all years yields an average age of 27.5. So neither particularly young or old. Looking at the graph, most of the Olympics tend to be clustered between 26-28 years old as well, interrupted by spikes of older years (such as 1924, 1956, 2004), and mixed in with some younger valleys every now and then (1932-1936, 1992-2000). Is there a clear cut trend of age over the last 108 years? A regression analysis revealed there was no correlation between age and year, meaning that since the Olympics restarted in 1896, there has been no significant trend of the average age either increasing or decreasing. Essentially this means that, on average for the Olympics, someone around 27 years old usually won.
Further looking at the data for each medalist type (gold, silver, bronze) per year revealed no trend either (we were trying to observe that maybe the age of the gold medalist is correlated over time, for example). One interesting observation to note is that over the last 40 years, the age of the silver medalist (green line) has been relatively low compared to the average age of a medalist.
(click on graph for larger image)
Age of PR for Elite Marathoners
For this next sub-investigation, I used the performance all-time lists found at www.alltime-athletics.com. This site has very deep lists for track and road events. In the men’s marathon it has listed all 1171 performances under 2:10:30. From this list, the top time (PR) of each performer as well as their age and nationality was extracted. In some cases the athletes (usually Kenyan or Moroccan) did not have birthdays or only the year was listed. For the athletes that just knew their birth year, I assigned January 1 as their birthday (so at worst, their PR age is off by one year). For the seven athletes that did not have birthdays, they were removed from the data. This data transformation resulted in ages, times and nationalities for 451 performers who ran under 2:10:30. (more…)
