Half Marathon Finish Times

I'm on the board for the La Crosse Fitness Festival. It was recently announced that we will be suspending the Marathon and running a Half Marathon race starting on Grandad bluff. In order to plan the event start time we wanted to consider the finish times of the 2012 race. Obviously the new course will be faster, and probably the fastest course in the state, but it will give us an idea of how many people finish at any given time and when the majority of runners finish.

Taking the results from 2012 I've computed the total number of minutes totmin.

Fastest runner completed it in 74.01 minutes. The slowest was 227.3 minutes. The race has an official cutoff time of 4 hours. There were 1096 finishers, with an average time of 124.47 minutes. The standard deviation was 23.43minutes.

Percentiles  
1%    82.72   
5%    90.8  
10%    97.25       
25%    108.47  
50%    122.14      
75%    136.68  
90%    153.18  
95%    168.23
99%    202.23     

Below I have some STATA graphs with the distribution of finishers by time. The y axis is frequency(count), the x axis represents total minutes and the bins are 10 minutes wide. I’ve also included one below that which has the bins set at 1 minute wide. So that gives you a sense of at the finish line how many people will finish in a particular minute. The largest was 30 people at 2 hrs 6 minutes. 76% of the runners finish between 1 hour 35min (95min) and 2 hours 25minutes (145min). Only 31 people took longer than 3 hours.