Marathon graphs

Here are my collection of graphs from the Ottawa marathon. The first has been posted before. I’ts my training mileage graph. I think it nicely shows the mileage progression and pattern of types of training runs I did over the course of 16 weeks. The second graph was created by the TrackRunner software directly from my Garmin data. You can clearly see the spikes in the blue pace line representing walk breaks. The big spike comes from the one porta potty break I took during mile 18. The green elevation line ranges from 150 feet to about 300 feet with no single hill over 100 feet. Compare that to the Kirkland half marathon whose elevation ranged from about 0 feet to 500 feet!

The last graph was a lot of fun to make. I thought long and hard about the best way to visually represent my pace over the length of the course. A line graph or simple bar graph were obvious choices. Instead I went with a bar graph vertically centered at my average pace. This makes is very easy to see when I sped up and when I slowed down. I was pleased to see that the last 5.2 miles all came in below average. I’ll admit that the second order polynomial fit regression line might be taking things a step too far!