Previously, I conducted an analysis of the men’s race and the women’s race, looking at which age had the fastest average Bolder Boulder race times. The 23 year old women and the 20 year old men had the fastest average time. The Bolder Boulder is a great race to do a statistical analysis on because of the sheer volume of numbers, however, out of those 54k “runners” most are not serious runners and are simply out there to have fun. Thus, I wanted to compare the best of the best, so I took a look at the top five from each age group.

My goal was to get an idea of how age impacted time. Thus, I decided to score the Bolder Boulder similar to a cross country meet, but instead of places, I took the top five times from each age group and averaged them out. I wanted to see how the best from each age would stack up against each other. Let’s take a look at the men’s race:

This time the 26 year old age group won the prize with an average time of 32:21 and a tight standard deviation of 33 seconds. It’s interesting to note that ages 18, 19 and 20 which represented the top five in the overall average were no longer in the top five. In fact, the 20 year old age group didn’t even crack the top twenty. The top five consisted solely of ages 25-30, with the exception of the 27 year old group. This seems consistent with what I would expect, as that age range is often in their prime for running a distance of 10k. I think this analysis does a better job of capturing when males peak for the 10k.

Women’s Race:

The 23 year old women took the victory with an average time of 37:58. The top five times were from the ages of 22-28. This seems consistent with what I would have thought, as often times women peak before men do, especially in shorter distance running such as the 10k. This analysis is rather identical to the overall average that we saw earlier.