This last weekend, I made it up to Fargo, ND to observe the thousands of runners take to the streets on Saturday morning to push their bodies to the limits. I was not one of the racers, but my brother from Phoenix, Arizona happened to be one. Looking at the results online, it made me realize that massive amounts of data existed with races that wasn't being used to its fullest potential. Hence, I wanted to start visualizing some race data. I learned that working with race data is significantly more challenging than expected as Visualization tools aren't fit to handle time lengths as a data type, so even comparing something like pace or total time is a challenge. The only solution I've found is to convert everything to total seconds, which isn't much fun either.
Here's the start of the Fargo Marathon data visualization. I'll have a more complete visualization this weekend featuring both Half-Marathon/Marathon Runners. So far, the two graphs displayed are first the location of runners, and second the runners average pace over their age. I've added a trend line to the bottom graph. Keep in mind that runners below the trend line are on average a faster runner than their peers, while above the trend line means runners are slower than their peers at that age group. Click and play around with the visualization as much as you'd like!
If you have additional ideas for visualizations, shoot me a Tweet on Twitter @JamieVMartin or send me an e-mail at jvmartin07@gmail.com. I'd love to hear your thoughts! Finally - watch for my final visualization and dashboard later this week.
