IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/phsmap/v365y2006i2p509-520.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Scaling properties of marathon races

Author

Listed:
  • Alvarez-Ramirez, Jose
  • Rodriguez, Eduardo

Abstract

Some regularities in popular marathon races are identified in this paper. It is found for high-performance participants (i.e., racing times in the range [2:15,3:15]h), the average velocity as a function of the marathoner's ranking behaves as a power-law, which may be suggesting the presence of critical phenomena. Elite marathoners with racing times below 2:15h can be considered as outliers with respect to this behavior. For the main marathon pack (i.e., racing times in the range [3:00,6:00]h), the average velocity as a function of the marathoner's ranking behaves linearly. For this racing times, the interpersonal velocity, defined as the difference of velocities between consecutive runners, displays a continuum of scaling behavior ranging from uncorrelated noise for small scales to correlated 1/f-noise for large scales. It is a matter of fact that 1/f-noise is characterized by correlations extended over a wide range of scales, a clear indication of some sort of cooperative effect.

Suggested Citation

  • Alvarez-Ramirez, Jose & Rodriguez, Eduardo, 2006. "Scaling properties of marathon races," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 365(2), pages 509-520.
  • Handle: RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:365:y:2006:i:2:p:509-520
    DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2005.09.066
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378437105010344
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only. Journal offers the option of making the article available online on Science direct for a fee of $3,000

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.physa.2005.09.066?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Kwong, Hok Shing & Nadarajah, Saralees, 2019. "Modelling dynamics of marathons – A mixture model approach," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 534(C).

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:365:y:2006:i:2:p:509-520. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/physica-a-statistical-mechpplications/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.