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Phys Ed Gretchen Reynolds on the science of fitness.

Who are the world’s fastest slower runners?

A new analysis of more than a million recreational marathon participants at major marathons around the world finds that the world’s swiftest amateur marathoners do not share the same nationalities as the world’s elite racers, many of whom come from East Africa. In terms of average pace for its runners, the United States sits near the bottom of the nations included, vastly trailing that marathon powerhouse, Iceland.

As anyone who has run or witnessed a marathon knows, it is a unique and gripping event, generally considered to be the longest, most grueling distance that average, recreational runners, myself included, can reasonably aim to contest. It also is one of the few sports of any kind in which everyday athletes typically compete on the same course, at the same time, as elite professionals.

Monday’s Boston Marathon, with its 27,000 runners pacing through chilly drizzle, showcased just how much striving, struggle, socializing, rue, perseverance and joy can be packed into 26.2 miles.

So it’s not surprising that marathon racing has become a popular participant sport worldwide.

But while much is known and has been written about the finishing times and home countries of the world’s top professional marathoner runners, far less attention has been devoted to ordinary middle- and back-of-the-pack marathon runners globally.

So for the new analysis, which was funded by and published on the noncommercial website RunRepeat.com on Monday, statisticians in Denmark adopted the simple strategy of gathering databases about participants from many large marathons, eventually compiling information about all finishers between 2009 and 2014 at the Amsterdam, Athens, Berlin, Boston, Budapest, Chicago, Frankfurt, London, Madrid, Marine Corps (Washington), Paris and Warsaw races.

Because the researchers wished to study recreational runners, they stripped out data about designated “elite” entrants, those swift, professional runners who are expected to compete for top finishes.

They were left with information about 1,298,466 sub-elite finishing times.

They grouped this information according to finishers’ nationality, excluding any countries for which there were fewer than 10 male and 10 female finishers during each of the six years studied.

Then they probed the data to determine which nations had produced, on average, the fastest and slowest non-elite marathon runners, as well as other measures of marathon interest and success.

The answers yielded surprises. The nation with the fastest recreational runners, on average, turned out to be Spain, where the average marathon finishing time was an impressive 3 hours 55 minutes, followed by Portugal at 3:59, Luxembourg at 4:00 and Iceland at 4:01.

The nation with the world’s most-leisurely marathon pace was the Philippines, with a national average finishing time of 5 hours 5 minutes, just above India at 5:03 and Japan at 4:40.

The United States sat near the bottom of the list, 39th among the 47 nations included, with a national average finishing time of 4 hours 29 minutes, just beneath New Zealand and one place above Korea.

The United States, however, was No. 1 in another of the aspects studied: the percentage of its marathon entrants who were female. Forty-five percent of American marathon racers were women, by far the highest percentage in the world

Spain had the lowest percentage of female runners, only 6 percent.

Because the gender composition of a nation’s runners obviously affects its composite average finishing time — female marathon runners are, as a group, slower than men — the researchers then broke out the fastest nations by each gender.

In doing so, they identified an unlikely nation as home to the best male and female recreational marathon runners in the world. Tiny Iceland proved to have the fastest recreational male marathon runners (with a 3:52 average finishing time) and also the fastest female runners (at 4:18). Iceland also improved its national average race time more than any other country in the world between 2009 and 2014, dropping its composite average finishing time by almost 24 minutes.

Of course, these statistics do not have any obvious, practical takeaway, although my son, the only runner in our family likely to have marathons still in his future, could chastise his father and me for being insufficiently Icelandic.

But the sociological implications of the data are fascinating. No East African nations, for instance, made the list, although most of the globe’s top professional marathon racers were born there.

“Many see Africa as the marathon continent, but they only dominate in the elite scene,” says Jens Jakob Andersen, a runner and statistician in Haderslev, Denmark, and the lead researcher for the new analysis. “In recreational running, it is not a popular sport.”

Meanwhile, the number of marathon participants from Russia soared by 300 percent and from China by 260 percent during the study’s time period, while participation among the Swiss fell by a third.

Why? The researchers have no idea. That’s the subject of another study.

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