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Analyzing and Visualizing Statistics for the Long Run
| RTN #: | 001 | Date: | 07-18-2014 |
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The Big Q: How much do the top XC runners improve each year on average? More Q's to Crunch: Do guys and girls have different expectations for getting faster in the fall? How many of the Top 50 incoming runners go missing each XC season? Do the results for the Top 2 and Top 10 differ from those of the Top 50? And in the long run: What's it all mean? A&V Stats Quest Methodology: Select the top 50 non-senior boys and girls from the Tully Runners New York XC leaderboard for final speed ratings results in each year from 2003 through 2012 and measure the one-year performance for those 100 athletes in each of the following years of 2004 through 2013. |
Every fall tens of thousands of New York high school runners hit the cross country trails, and most of them firmly believe that they will be better than their younger and more foolish selves from last year. This season they will listen to the sage advice of their coach, run smartly and fill their lungs with big air, avoid dares to leap over big ankle-destroying tree trunks that recently thudded across the practice course, and stay in peak condition instead of scarfing down way too many Twinkies.
Not to be a digital downer here, but as every veteran coach can tell you, the dreams of personal glory for a lot of runners just don't get spun into any kind of reality. Usually this failure to elevate is not due to any moral failing. The athletes are not running off to soccer, turning into Game of Thrones addicts, devoting too much time to academics, or simply deciding to slack off in their senior year. More commonly some freak injury strikes, or the runner overdoses on her summer mileage, or a guy's junior season was just too stupendous to keep rolling for a second year.
So as each XC season approaches, every runner faces that most anxiety-inducing question: How much better will I be at the end of the season after three to five months of excruciating miles and grueling workouts? The answer will be different for each runner over the course of a season, and factors such as age, the size of their school, stage of physical development, and gender ID all factor heavily into expectations for the year ahead.
Running the RtN A&V year's progression numbers for the top 50 male and top 50 female returning athletes for last ten years of speed ratings from the Tully Runners' data archive, we get a pretty solid report on how the top runners in the state fare on average. True, this is an elite subset of all runners, and the situation will be different for runners much farther down the charts who in general have less drive but also potentially much higher ceilings. When you put up a 200 TR season's rating the year before, the chances for doing much better are limited.
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♦ How much do the top XC runners improve each year on average?
In Short: The top runners average around a 2 to 3 second gain in speed on a 5K course from the previous season
The Long View: As the chart below of the 10 year's returns for NY elite runners shows, the overall average gain for the athletes on that fat dark red line hovers usually a little above the break-even 0 line. The average for the 10-year span for all male and female runners is 0.8 TR points, or about an average 2 second gain during a runner's races for the season. As can be seen from the skinny lines on the chart, the runners who hail from planet Mars always average a small gain in speed, while those from Venus usually tend to slip back a ways. Venus of course has a stronger gravity than does Mars, but other reasons behind these results will be discussed in the section on the guys and girls speed rating trends.
During the ten-year span, the change in speed ratings has been trending downward overall, though the Martians have done pretty well during the last two seasons. 2012 especially was a good year for both sets of runners. The change from a 4-class to a 5-class system for the NYSPHSAA schools in 2004 caused some fluctuations that took a few seasons to flatten out a bit, and the subsequent change back to 4 cleasses in 2011 also caused disruptions. The speed ratings for runners in 2011 were down, possibly in part due to the elimination of 20% of the berths for runners at the State championship, but 2012 had a big rebound in part because there was in general more room to grow for the returning runners.
♦ Do the guys and girls have different expectations for getting faster in the fall?
In Short: The elite boys average almost a 3 point gain on average, but the girls slip back at a rate of more than a point.
The Long View: As can be guessed from the previous chart, the top boys from their Mars habitats have much higher average speed ratings changes than do the girls from Venus. The boys' average gain have ranged from a low of 1.5 TR points in 2009 and 2011 to a high of 4.7 in 2012., and the average has been a 2.9 gain for them, about 9 seconds. The girls' best year was a 1.6 gain back in 2006 and the low point was last year at -4.1, with the overall average being a slip of -1.3, about 4 seconds.
The annual rise of the top 50 guys is certainly understandable because high school boys tend to follow a well-trodden path of becoming a factor on their team and in the state rankings in their sophomore year, building to greater prominence in their junior year, and then ending it all off with a final big effort as veteran seniors. Injuries can intrude on a boy's steady progress up the lists, but the majority of the male runners have small to moderate gains each year from their sophomore to senior seasons as they develop into bigger and stronger and wiser athletes.
The girls are a very different story from the guys and carry their own special pack of issues with them. Many of the top girls have six seasons among the top 200 runners in the state, and very few have a steady line of gains from year to year to year. A series of gains and slips are far more common, and some in fact are at their fastest when they are middle schoolers, even if they are still growing physically through high school. For a girl who hits the 140 TR mark as an 8th grader, the prospects for raising that mark in the following seasons are not huge. The top girls also are more likely to have to battle the psychological strains of seeing fast new younger runners passing by them on their team and at the meets.
Of the 527 boys in the results, 354 had a gain of some type in their TR scores, while 127 had declines. For the 511 girls, 214 had gains and 252 had slips. The boys had 49 runners in the Big Gain category (a TR jump of 10 points or more) and only 12 on the other side in the Big Slip area (-10 or more decline). The girls had almost as many Big Gainers as the guys at 44, but they were dwarfed by the number of Big Slippers at 77. The most populated category for the guys was the Moderate Gain slot (4-9 TR jump), while for the girls it was the Moderate Slip area (a loss of 4 to 9 points).
♦ How many of the Top 50 incoming runners go missing each XC season?
In Short: On average a total of about 4 of the preseason top girl and boy runners combined are not in the Tully Runner leaderboards at the end of the season, most of them because of injuries and two-thirds of them being girls.
The Long View: For a small group of runners, there are no gains, slips, or even treading water. In the Tully Runners individual profile preview of the top returning NY state runners that Bill Meylan publishes each summer, there are almost always some names that don't appear anywhere on the extensively populated leaderboards come November. So what happened? Mainly it's major injuries or illnesses that knock runners out, though sometimes a runner's family moves out of state or they turn to swimming or just burn out and drop out of XC or decide to go pro.
The disappearing runner phenomenon is about twice as evident among the girls than the boys, averaging out at 2.7 runners for the girls compared to the boys' 1.4. The MIA rate stayed fairly even for the boys during the ten year span, but for the girls the average has risen to 4 runners per year during the last five years. Are some of the top girls pushing the training limits too far and getting injured? Among 199 of the top returning girls from all size classifications (A,B,C,D, and CHSAA-PSAL-AIS) for 2013, 22 were missing from the leaderboards last year, which is a higher rate (11%) than for the top 50 runners (6%). There are probably a number of factors in play here, but it could be a cause of some concern for the XC community.
♦ Do the results for the Top 2 and Top 10 differ from those of the Top 50?
In Short: For the top boys and girls, the struggle to exceed last year's results becomes even stiffer as you reach the Top 2 or Top 10 categories, and it's even tougher for the top girls than for the top guys.
The Long View: The challenge of staying high up in the charts is big enough for the Top 50 runners, but it's even tougher for the Top 10, or the Top 2. But toughness is the essence of the top runners, and the boys' Top 10 returners even with their lower boost potential are running at a 2.4 average gain, which is pretty close to the Top 50 group that averaged 2.9. Most of the years saw the two groups staying fairly close, but 2009 was a giant exception. In a very strange turn of events, not one of the Top 10 runners posted a gain, and the top guy, Alex Hatz of Fayetteville-Manlius, suffered the biggest drop among Top 50 runners in the 10 year span after making a gallant but only partially succesful attempt to return to action following kidney surgery in late August. The results for the Top 2 have been much more problematic, as 3 were missing from the charts, 10 posted losses, and their overall average was 0, or just staying even. Then again, when you start off trying to better a Top 2 returning mark that averages 191, that's not easy.
The results are more variable for the girls, as the Top 10 girls were nearly a point behind the Top 50 group with a -2.2 score to the bigger group's -1.3. In only three of the years did the two groups have results within a point of each other. Two of the biggest differences were in 2004 when a Top 10 group led by Saratoga's Nicole Blood and Warwick Valley's Aislinn Ryan posted a 4.0 gain and almost all positive results among the ten runners while the Top 50 slid back at a slight -0.3 rate. The situation was flipped in 2012 when the Top 10 group slipped at a -4.9 rate while the Top 50 group had a small 0.5 gain. The two biggest declines in 2012 were by girls who helped their team win a national championship, so all things are relative. But in 2013, not one of the top 16 returning runners posted a gain, and among the Top 20 girls over the last three years, the runners who have slipped have outnumbered the gainers by 38 to 20. So progression at the top is a tough commodity to buy.
♦ In the long run: What's it all mean?
When September rolls around, XC runners will start blazing the trails in the hopes of reaching new heights this season. Many will put the pedal to the metal and speed to new levels. Others will find themselves moving in reverse. Recently for the returning girls among the top 50 or 200 runners, the tendency has been on average that they will experience a minor slide. For the top runners, even slipping back a ways may not be such a big deal. After all, three of the four girls' 2013 NY State champions had negative changes to their overall speed ratings from the previous year, and the remaining champ was a newbie freshman starting with a clean slate. XC is still a team sport, and if as a frontrunner you post a -6 drop on the season and you still help your team take the Class B state championship, that's got to feel pretty good. And in the long run, once you've busted a gut to get to the top of the hill in XC, going down a ways doesn't feel so bad.
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Next Post: What do the numbers say about class grade and expectations for the coming cross country season for NY's top high school runners? The last of the three posts in this RTN series part will break down the numbers by size classifications A, B, C, D, and the New York City confederations.
Looking Up the Numbers: The data for the article can be viewed as a Google sheet at Summary of Performances of Preseason Top 50 Runners NY XC Runners for 2004-2013, which is composed of a sheet of results for the boys and one for the girls.