To compare finishers trend year to year is tricky, as the number of participants keeps changing. Top %age finisher is a good cohort to compare the finishers time across years. In this chart average finish times of Top 1% and 5% of the finishers across men and women categories are plotted.

• 2019 is the best with 00:37:31 for Top 1% male average finish, and for female it was 00:44:28 in 2017.
• For Top 5% finishers, things turned a bit different. The best for Top 5% male average finishers was 00:42:49 in 2017. For female it was 00:49:28, and it was also in 2017
• 2016, 2017, 2019 have been very competitive in terms of top 1% and top 5% average with difference of few microseconds
• So can we say 2017 race is the fastest overall?
• But what happened in 2018, that made the average finish times so high? We saw signficant increase (36% from previous year) in participation in 2018. That could have brought down the average. We also saw the humidity on race day in 2018 is one of the highest.