The analysis of the pacing profiles based on performance level of the male finishers in the istanbul marathon

Abstract

The aim of this study was to determine, on the basis of performance levels, running pace profiles of the male runners (n = 2095) who completed the 40th International Istanbul Marathon in less than 6 hours. While 0-35 km of the marathon was divided into 5 km long sections, 35-42.2 km of it was determined as the last segment which was 7.2 km. The average speeds of the running pace of the athletes in the determined segments were calculated. Performance groups were evaluated in 8 different groups with the athletes completing the race in the finishing time slower than the winner’s race time. In these context, the independent variables were performance levels and the segments, dependent variable was mean running times in all these segments. The difference between performance groups and successive segments was evaluated with Two-way repeated measures ANOVA. The results also showed that mean pacing alterations between successive segments throughout the race had some similarities and were correlated between the performance levels. Analysis showed that there were statistically significant alterations between successive segments pacing profiles depending on for each performance levels (p