Austin Marathon Pace Math Behind a 3 Hour 30 Minute Finish

Richard Joseph Spinelli finished the 2024 Austin Marathon in 3 hours and 30 minutes, and the number is worth taking apart, because a marathon time is a piece of arithmetic before it is anything else.

The arithmetic

Three hours and thirty minutes is 210 minutes. A marathon is 26.2 miles. Divide one by the other and the pace is a shade over eight minutes per mile, which is the figure runners actually train to and the one his target was set at.

The table looks even. The race is not. Almost every runner who misses a target misses it in the last six miles, where the pace that felt easy at mile ten becomes the pace that has to be defended.

Why Austin makes it harder

The Austin course is known for its climbs, most of them in the first half, and a course like that punishes two mistakes. The first is running the early hills at goal pace, which spends energy the flat second half will ask for. The second is running the early hills too cautiously and then trying to buy the time back on tired legs. A 3 30 finish there means the hills were paid for at the right price.

Even splits, or close to them

The cleanest way to run 3 30 is to run two halves of about 1 hour 45 minutes each, which is called an even split. Most amateur marathons finish with a positive split, the second half slower than the first, and the size of that gap is a fair measure of how well the day was judged. His finish time is documented; his splits are not, and the chapter does not guess at them. What the time does say is that the pace set beforehand was the pace he ran.

The photograph

The image on the running page is from that finish: medal in one hand, water in the other, and a bib with a nickname on it. The time is the eight minute miles, added up.

From the biography of Richard Joseph Spinelli. His home page is richardjosephspinelli.com. All chapters