At GeeksOnFeet we ran a unique mile challenge that put the runners who participated in NMDC Hyderabad Marathon 2024 through two contrasting segments each covering a distance of a mile: one uphill and one downhill. We just published the Leaderboard here. This challenge provided interesting insights into the pacing strategies of both marathoners and half-marathoners across different age groups and genders. We dive into the data to explore the performance dynamics and uncover a few takeaways.
Top Performers: Among the half-marathoners, Thomas Bobby Philip led the field with an impressive average mile pace of 4:04 min/km, demonstrating remarkable consistency across both segments. On the marathon side, Raju Kanakapudi was the top performer, clocking an average pace of 4:13 min/km.
Average Mile Times: When comparing the two groups, half-marathoners generally maintained faster average paces than marathoners for obvious reasons.
Time Differences: Across the board, runners exhibited faster paces on the downhill segments compared to the uphill ones, as expected. However, a few maintained highly consistent times across both uphill and downhill. Notable among them is Thomas Bobby Philip, who has kept the difference to about 42 seconds.
Runners who ran the marathon distance, the data is not very different. Rajanish Lal has the lowest difference among the top 10 with just 18s separating the uphill and downhill segments.
Age Category Performance: Thomas Bobby Philip (55-59) and Chandrasekaran Subramanian (55-59) were among the top performers. On the marathon side, Bapineedu Anaparti (60-64) is the top performer.
Younger Runners, Roshan (20-24), Raju Kanakapudi (25-29) made a strong showing, who competed in the half-marathon category, where speed over shorter distances played to their strengths.
Complied by Team GeeksOnFeet, for the love of running