2011 Perth City to Surf Stats

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Like every year, August sees the thousands taking part in the Perth City to Surf, and with that comes the chance for some stats. Why? Curiosity more than anything, and to convince myself that my time in the 12km run of 1 hour 9 mins and 36 seconds wasn’t so bad given I came down with the dreaded man flu just 36 hours prior to the race starting.

Despite the papers saying around 42,000 competed, the official results site lists results for 32,243 (excluding <10 people listed as NA for age and sex). 15,424 males (45.1%) and 18,791 females (54.9%)*.

Individual results are available at Perth Now.

Female Male Total
4km Walk 3118 (65.6%) 1638 (34.4%) 4756
4km Run 1904 (55.9%) 1503 (44.1%) 3407
12km Walk 6058 (74.4%) 2087 (25.6%) 8145
12km Run 6507 (45.5%) 7805 (54.5%) 14312
Half Marathon 1005 (36.8%) 1728 (63.2%) 2733
Marathon 199 (23.1%) 663 (76.9%) 862

Next of interest is the finishing times. Here we have both the median and mean for each sex for each event. Means are 2.5% trimmed, which means the fastest and slowest 2.5% of people were removed before calculating the mean, due to the mean being heavily influenced by outliers.

Female Male Total
4km Walk 47 : 46.6 47 : 46.4 46.8 : 46.5
4km Run 29 : 30.6 27 : 28.6 28.4 : 29.7
12km Walk 125 : 124.9 122 : 122.1 124.4 : 124.2
12km Run 80 : 82.8 68 : 70.5 73.7 : 76.1
Half Marathon 125 : 126.2 111 : 113.1 116.3 : 117.9
Marathon 251 : 251.7 232 : 237.8 237.2 : 241

format being “Median : Mean (trimmed)”

From here you might be interested in how you stacked up against your peers by age. Below is a series of graphs and small tables for each sex for each event. These graphs are called frequency polygons, they’re nothing to be afraid of, they are essentially histograms but with lines rather than bars. This way we can see multiple groups plotted on the same axis with hopefully less clutter. For some of these graphs I can cut off at arbitrary upper limits to remove a few… ‘stragglers’.

4km Walk

For the females:

Age People Median : Mean (trimmed)
0-18 926 45.6 : 45.2
19-29 497 45.6 : 46
30-39 652 47.9 : 47.9
40-49 615 46.2 : 46.3
50-79 428 48.3 : 49
Total 3118 46.7 : 46.6

For the Males:

Age People Median : Mean (trimmed)
0-18 620 46.1 : 45
19-29 157 46.7 : 46.3
30-39 308 47.5 : 47.5
40-49 322 47.5 : 47.4
50-99 231 47.3 : 48.1
 Total 1638 47 : 46.4

Not a lot of variation here, as expected though with this event. Twice as many females in this than males and a similar spread across the ages for each sex. Good to see in the young group, especially with the males, there’s a small group that ran ahead (see the first peak for the pink line in the male graph).

4km Run

For the females:

Age People Median : Mean (trimmed)
0-18 718 29.1 : 30.2
19-29 402 28.8 : 29.7
30-39 374 29.5 : 31.1
40-49 337 29.6 : 31.2
50-79 73 31.2 : 34.8
Total 1904 29.2 : 30.6

For the males:

Age People Median : Mean (trimmed)
0-18 643 26.2 : 27.4
19-29 196 25.4 : 26.9
30-39 235 29.4 : 31.3
40-49 321 27.4 : 29.1
50-79 108 28.5 : 32.1
Total 1503 27.1 : 28.6

Here we see a bit more variation, but times are still very close across age groups. Little variation within the females between the 30-39 and 40-49 group, and in the males the 40-49 group sitting slightly faster than the 30-39 group. I personally wouldn’t read too much into this given the nature of the 4km events, having large numbers does make this representative though of what is going on. Given the skewed distribution (tail to the right) the medians might tell a better story here as being more representative where the peak lies.

12km Walk

For the females:

Age People Median : Mean (trimmed)
0-18 676 126.8 : 126.8
19-29 1952 123.9 : 123.5
30-39 1234 125.6 : 125
40-49 1170 124.5 : 124.8
50-79 1026 126 : 126.6
Total 6058 125.1 : 124.9

For the males:

Age People Median : Mean (trimmed)
0-18 333 126.7 : 125.2
19-29 421 121 : 119.7
30-39 388 124.5 : 125.1
40-49 375 122 : 120.7
50-99 567 119.6 : 120.8
Total 2087 122.2 : 122.1

Again with the walkers, as you would expect, this is very tight. Another event dominated by the females, not much more to say other than looks good they all walked together.

12 km run

For the females:

Age People Median : Mean (trimmed)
0-18 618 88.3 : 90.3
19-29 2585 80 : 82.4
30-39 1825 78.8 : 80.8
40-49 1087 79.6 : 81.9
50-79 392 81.8 : 85
Total 6507 80.5 : 82.8

For the males:

Age People Median : Mean (trimmed)
0-18 895 70.2 : 73.2
19-29 2501 66.2 : 69
30-39 2171 66.4 : 68.8
40-49 1426 68.6 : 71
50-99 812 72.7 : 75.6
Total 7805 67.8 : 70.5

This was the big event. And I was really surprised, and impressed, to see that there was little variation with age. The 19-29 and 30-39 groups for the guys pulled up slightly faster, the 40-49 for the females held their own as well. I really expected to see more of a staggering to the right with increasing age.

Half Marathon

For the females:

Age People Median : Mean (trimmed)
0-24 139 120.7 : 124.6
25-34 434 123.3 : 124.6
35-44 285 126.8 : 127.5
45-54 126 128.4 : 129.2
55-99 21 133.4 : 138.9
Total 1005 125.2 : 126.2

For the males:

Age People Median : Mean (trimmed)
0-24 217 109.3 : 111.1
25-34 633 108.5 : 111.2
35-44 533 112.4 : 113.2
45-54 258 113.4 : 115.6
55-99 87 126 : 125.2
Total 1728 111.1 : 113.1

These graphs are a little more jagged due to the slightly lower numbers and wider spread of times. Again very consistent. The females have less of a sharp peak, suggesting they didn’t run in together in a big group like the males.

Marathon

Everyone

For the females:

Age People Median : Mean (trimmed)
0-24 19 254.9 : 255.4
25-34 83 243.2 : 248.8
35-44 54 244.1 : 243.1
45-99 43 259.1 : 266.7
Total 199 251.1 : 251.7

For the males:

Age People Median : Mean (trimmed)
0-24 72 229.4 : 236.3
25-34 206 230.6 : 237
35-44 210 228.2 : 234.5
45-99 175 239.9 : 243.8
Total 663 231.6 : 237.8

On average the guys ran in 20 minutes ahead of the gals. For context 4 hours is 240 minutes, so the males were 10 minutes faster than that and the females 10 minutes slower, on average.

Other stats

Anything else you’d like to see, statistic wise or graphed just let me know in a comment below. Or if you, heaven forbid, spot an error.

Thanks to all those who participated, see you again next year!

Geek speak

These statistics and graphs were produced in R, graphs using the ggplot2 package using geom_frequency. The code used for this is available here. It’s not pretty by any means. The data was manually scrapped from the results site given it loads in separate pages for each sex/age group.

* 28 wheel chair participants excluded as I couldn’t easily get their data from the site.


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