Does running fast last year matter this season?
When a new season of track & field kicks off, we love to look back at how fast individuals ran last season and guess where they might land in the future. Common sense says that someone who was in the upper-tier of times from the previous season would be a contender for a top finish in the upcoming one. But is that actually the case? After looking at roughly 10 years of championship results, there’s evidence to say both yes and no.
In the evaluation of data, athletes who competed at a national championship competition in track across Divisions 1, 2, and 3 were considered. In this case, the focus was on distance events (800 meters and up). Across all of these events, we compared an athlete’s personal bests for the current and prior seasons relative to how they finished at the national championships. The final data we looked at contained 6794 athletes across seven events and both genders. Let’s dive into what we found.
One quick note: you may notice that there are “extra” runners in the men’s 1500 meters and women’s 800 meters. This is because these events are part of the heptathlon and decathlon based on respective gender.
In the plot above, we looked at how an athlete finished at NCAA’s in the current season versus what they had run last season. The results are mixed but outside of the two events including multi-athletes, there appear to be minimal relationships. The lines-of-best-fit were added to help emphasize these relationships, and we don’t see much here. If the relationship was strong, we’d expect a stronger slope, rising from left to right. Both the women’s steeplechase and 3000 meters do have a bit more aggressive slope, indicating potentially stronger relationships there.
What about looking at how those athletes ran in the same season?
Again, we have the same conundrum with multi-athletes but look at the women’s steeple, 3k, and 10k. All three events see noticeably stronger relationships than compared to our data for the prior season. Of course, in statistics, we can actually check these relationships with a correlation test.
In the above, taller bars mean a stronger correlation. Since the women’s 800 and men’s 1500 are skewed based on our multi-athletes, the steeplechase is the strongest correlated event for both genders. Particularly in women, there is a substantially stronger relationship between how women perform in the current season and how they finish at NCAA’s (noted by the bigger gap in the bars). The men show a similar but weaker relationship. In fact, while most of the men’s results are a wash comparing the current and prior seasons, the women show significant gaps in the 1500, steeple, and 10k.
Let’s focus on just the top 10 in each event. Does eliminating some of the noisy data on the backend change what we see?
No matter how hard you stare and compare these two, there’s not much to find suggesting there’s a major difference.
This one requires less eye-straining. Clearly, there are some big gaps between correlation showing up when we focus on only the top 10. Particularly, the 10k and steeplechase tend to be much more related to current season performances than anything from the previous year. So why is that? And why is it that other events seem to be equally related to this year versus last year?
One potential reason is that these two events, the 10k and the steeplechase, are significantly different when it comes to race dynamics. Many championship races often come down to a “sit and kick” style, keeping a moderate pace before a fast finish. Consequently, runners with slower personal bests are able to hang around much longer and potentially place higher. That tends not to be an option in the other two events.
The steeplechase is very much a skill event and the barriers tend to force rhythm rather than a sporadic pace. Runners like to break up the pack to create more space when approaching barriers and the easiest way to do that is a fast pace. In the 10k, the top runners will often make the pace more honest, knowing there’s a better chance of breaking opponents over the long distance. Sure, some may try and hang on, but many lower-tier runners aren’t capable of racing at 98% of the top tier’s speed and will get dropped well before the finish.
So to answer our original question, yes, running fast last year matters, but only to some degree. If you ran fast last year, odds are you will perform similarly this year, giving you the potential for an NCAA Championship appearance. We saw there is at least some correlation across the board between personal bests and NCAA finish, proving the obvious — faster times make you more likely to make NCAA’s. But notably, we also saw that regardless of how fast you run last season or this one, it tends to only have a major impact in the steeplechase and the 10k.
