By connecting your Strava account, some of your fastest runs at various distances over the last 6 months are automatically found. These runs are then fed into a machine learning algorithm that uses other runners' actual marathon times and compares their training history to yours.
While we believe our algorithm can usually predict your marathon time within about 5% (10-15 minutes), there are many factors that can't be accounted for. Things like the sleep you got the night before, getting chafing, tying your laces too tight, or other common hindrances cannot be factored in, so there will always be some level of error. The prediction will also be less accurate if you do not upload all of your training runs to Strava or never did training runs at close to maximum effort.
Using a complex algorithm based on past studies and machine learning, we are able to effectively create a difficulty rating based on relevant marathon conditions. These include but are not limited to: temperature, elevation, and whether the marathon is a road or trail based run.
When you enter your predicted marathon finish time, this is taken into account when comparing between marathons. This is because some factors affect faster runners more than slower runners, or vice versa. For example, a very hot marathon will probably have less impact on someone expecting to run a 2:30 marathon when compared to someone expecting to run a 5:00 marathon.
We are constantly working to improve our algorithms, which may result in changes to the marathon comparison tool over time. The predictions will also change as the marathon date gets closer and weather data becomes more accurate.
In the marathon comparer, difficulty is calculated at a 3:30 marathon time. If you adjust your time to be a 4 hour marathon for example, the list may not be perfectly sorted at this time.
If you think there are issues with any marathon listings, we'd greatly appreciate if you could let us know at support@statathon.com and we'll try our best to sort it out.
We are always working to add more marathons! If there is a specific marathon you are interested in viewing, please email us at support@statathon.com with the name of the marathon and we'll upload it as soon as we can.
Don’t see your question listed? Send us an email at support@statathon.com.