Statesmas Eve

With the 43rd annual running of the Western States 100 starting tomorrow, and taper tantrums in full effect, I thought it'd be fun to post a graph I've been working on. It plots the paces of various runners' times over the States course based on aid station splits I found on the WS website. My choices were fairly arbitrary. I selected a few of the runners based on our relative speeds across shorter distances and because their times loosely translate to my goals for this year. I included DBo and Krar mainly because I was curious how their paces deviated throughout the day for a mid-15 hour and high-14 hour finish, respectively.

Here are the plotted times from fastest to slowest:

Rob Krar - 2014: 14:53:22 (1st place)
Dylan Bowman - 2014: 15:36 (3rd place)
Brett Rivers - 2014: 16:20 (9th place)
David Laney - 2015: 17:01 (8th place)
Paul Terranova - 2015: 17:43 (10th place)
Stephen Wassather (Me) - 2015: 18:50 (18th place)

Click to enlarge

A few notes about reading the graph: the graph follows the States course from left to right, and the higher on the y-axis the faster the pace.

There are a lot of factors that'll play into top-10 finishing times this year, the most crucial being heat. If anything, the chart gives me a good idea of where I need to "lean against my limits" (to borrow from Bob Shebest) on Saturday to vie for a coveted top-10 spot.