linear

Marathons and Medians – Graphics

Saw an article in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend about marathon runners and times. I love the graphics they use and the charts and tables and all. Did some poking around and couldn’t find their graphic online to look for copyright info and a place to request permissions to use their images. But, I did track down the data source (listed at the bottom of the article) as a website called Running USA and a place on their website where statistics and reports about the state of marathon races in the U.S. are posted. From that website, I noted data for Median Marathon Times and for Number of Finishers. The graphs and those data are listed below.

Ways to use these graphics include:

• Ask students to identify the number of runners that finished a marathon in a given year.
• Ask students the median time of marathons for males or females in a given year.
• Ask students to generate a linear regression model for the median times and for the number of finishers then use those models for predictions.
• Ask the students reasons why the median times are staying the same even though the number of runners in increasing.
• And many more!

The data are public and my graphs are Creative Commons so use any way you want according to the licensing information below the images.

Marathons and Medians by Donna Gaudet is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.