The curious case of the Filipina Mary Joy Tabal?

Welcome back to another chapter of our journey!

In this post, we will go ahead and examine, using the TALENT BANDS we so proposed in the previous chapter, the athletic prowess of Mary Joy Tabal, whom everybody know has just finally attained an olympic ticket to Rio in the marathon. We must admit that we are less familiar with the details of her career than perhaps Agus Prayogo's or Eduardo Buenavista's, and we grant that we might not be completely accurate in some of the factual information we are about to present, such as her pbs at the shorter distances.

According to a few seemingly less maintained websites, and from scant recollection of her results, we come gingerly to a list of fastest BANDS(not times, since we aren't exactly sure what her pbs are, since the IAAF website doesn't provide any compilation) below:

5k:16:50 to 17:20
10k:34:40-35:40
HM:1:17-1:19
FM: 2:43:30 -2:47:30(for this band we already know exactly where in the band she stood with her recent achievement at the ottawa marathon of 2:43:30, but the band is nevertheless useful for statistical purposes when predicting how well some other female athletes with similar pbs run)

*Disclaimer: We believe Mary Joy's pbs for all these distances lie reasonably within the bands based on all our information sourcing, and if the predictor calculator that we are going to use together later below indicate some mismatch with the bands provided, the errors are acceptable if we can allow that there must also exists bands that overlap to some degree! As to what specific degree of overlap---this we can't say for sure until we actually run statistical tests on thousands and thousands of data. One should check personally with her to get more up-to-date information.

First and foremost, why the use of bands?

Bands are primarily used, in fact always used, in data representation in the real-time and dynamic environment because no measuring instrument is perfect! This includes the men/women conducting the data measurement with the already imperfect data collecting instrument! Does that make any sense? So whether you are collecting temperature readings from the sea of Antarctica, PM2.5 readings from the Air Quality Station in Bukit Timah, or taking a survey of the human population regarding a trending subject of society, you get band(s) of measurements. Using these or their like, and often in combination/comparison with pre-existing data, scientists and researchers from the respective fields can do all sorts of magic with these data with equally magical statistical tools(software) ranging from probability distribution analysis, multivariate linear regression analysis, analysis of variance and your more familiar standard deviation and mean---something all local highschool students study in very simple terms. The results of these tools are extremely important in painting almost a beautiful picture or story of the very article of analysis, and how perhaps the said article behaves in the presence of other articles that you would also put through the same tools! And the article(s) can be anything you define in the world! Just name it! There is a saying that goes: "nothing in this world is unquantifiable, except perhaps dark matter or energy!" If you find a proposed value/quality that hasn't been quantified statistically in any way yet, that is only because it has not yet been done so. Does that make sense? Before the downing of MH370, vast swathes of the bottomless Indian Ocean have never been sonar-mapped! Why? Because it just simply hadn't been done so! There was no reason to find out how it looked like underneath unless you, or rather many people thought a jumbo plane had gone down there!

Next to foremost, is there any precedence or suggestion of the use of such statistical bands in specifically the distance running world?

There are so many aspects of distance running sport to be quantified---that is virtually quantifying haven! For as long as sports science existed, sports scientists and their statistical tools of analysis, together with their coaches, instructors, physiotherapists, nutritionists, psychologists, doctors, technical directors and many more other assistants are constantly observing then recording and measuring everything and anything! Science attempts to want to control everything(though it really can't! And that's another topic altogether!), to find a physical, social, emotional, psychological reason behind anything and everything, and quantifying seems to be the only objective or non-objective way to go about the job! Our very own Singapore Sports Institute has taken the very lead in moving towards a more science-based(quantifying) approach to all kinds of sport, and one can peruse their website for evidence of such. Ruiyong has also probably been an unconsciously partaking exponent of SSI and the quantifying methods that had been the concept of its birth! He had embraced the altitude chamber in which he gain his oxygen carrying red blood cells, and gotten world class medical and technical running advice from them! He had ate, drank, and slept statistics and quantifying methods! But he now rejects virtually in wholesale the very thing that he has embraced, by claiming that one can overwhelmingly throw statistical trends and models in distance running performances into the dustbin when it comes to qualifying for the marathon in Rio! And perhaps leave it all to Father Miracle!


What a bitter irony!?!

Sorry for the digression, and back to the topic of Mary Joy Tabal and her seemingly impossible mission of qualifying for the Rio olympic marathon, as suggested by Ruiyong's language expression on his facebook page! Was it really all that impossible that a MIRACLE had to happen, as was implicitly implied by Ruiyong, for Mary Joy to go to Rio? Let us start the analysis!


To make our case clear-cut and simple for the average non-statistical or non-scientific folk who might not find or have any predisposition towards quantifiable methods, we shall use the time bands for Mary Joy Tabal in its singularity and find out if they are simply mutually statistically consistent within some acceptable error using the algorithm of the world famous McMillian pace/results calculator. Then one also finds the time bands getting bigger with distance, and the reason of doing so was to conduct some really basic and non-complex 'standardization' of the bands by a factor of 2, to reflect the proportionate increase in distance. Next, we are not going to consider the bands could overlap---though in an environment as real and dynamic as the human being's psychological and physiological body, they actually definitely will! (Comment in the section below to enquire about what I mean by overlapping bands!) We are also not going to even think about any other factors, controllable and non-controllable, from the external environment or internally within the human being, that might or might not have caused Mary Joy to run faster or slower! The bands provided above are what they are, based on the little information on performances of Mary that we have right now, unless Mary Joy herself comes on board and be a willing specimen of our analysis! Is there a reason why I use the McMillian calculator? I don't have a scientific or statistical rationale for this, but Renato Canova himself uses this tool to predict training and race paces for his athletes, and therefore I would like to use it as well. How did I know that? He mentioned it a couple years back on the American Forum Letsrun.com. So here is the website to calculate:

https://www.mcmillanrunning.com/

Once you are in the website, you may enter Mary Joy's marathon result of 2:43:30 into the box for 'recent race time' and immediately click on the 'calculate paces'. Why did we do this? Why did we key in 2:43:30 into the box? Because this time was indicative of her current marathoning ability, and using this information we were then going to check against McMillians ultra reliable algorithm whether the time bands provided from our information sourcing above could provide a reasonable match! After calculation, one finds that we get a compatible match for the 10k band of 34:40-35:40. We didn't get a match for the 5k band of 16:50 to 17:20, missing a couple of seconds. We then had a final match for the half-marathon band of 1:17 to 1:19.

It is worthy to note that Mary Joy had a career opening marathon of 2:48:00, already only 3minutes away from the female olympic standard of 2:45. Is it the same for a male athlete who is 3minutes away from 2:19? The 3minutes in Mary Joy's case would be statistically closer to 2:45 than the mathematical or numerical difference in time suggests! Why? Because first and foremost if you are modelling or comparing the value of a race performance outcome from scratch without wanting to collect any sample data from anyone, then many variables such as velocity, gender, age and perhaps a quantifiable ability/talent would be ordinarily factored into some hypothetical partial differential equations for race performance ratings, from which one can then model universally and accurately across all genders, velocities, and talents, how excellent(well-rated) any performance was. If one doesn't understand this, just simply then think about how vastly different the speeds for 2:45 and 2:19 are, and that 3minutes of running at these paces will yield completely different lengths or distances! Does that make any sense at all? These things, as well as the fact that Mary Joy had very good time band matches using the world reknowned McMillian race predictor calculator, show us that, far from the 'MIRACLE' Ruiyong had posited prematurely and perhaps embarrassingly on his facebook page, one could instead safely come to the statistically and/or scientifically acceptable conclusion that the result of 2:43:30 was just OPTIMUS!

But the same cannot be held for Ruiyong, because upon keying in the required pace from his pb at 10k(good indicator of marathoning potential according to Science in Sport magazine), one doesn't get anywhere close to 2:18:xx!

Till next time

Hardwork doesn't beat talent if all things being equal!

Welcome back to my blog after a long hiatus in which the few of us required some much needed retrospection and introspection about our motivations and intentions for setting up this blog. After which we decided that we had virtually zero ill will in our hearts and could peaceably, with ourselves, continue supplying the blog as per normal. This also allowed our main character Soh Ruiyong time to reflect on a personally disastrous life story in 2016 so far, for all the reasons we have already painstakingly affirmed in every of our previous posts.

Indonesia's Agus Prayogo has a pb for 10000m in 29:25. If we define such ability as 'talent', then the million dollar question is: can 'hardwork' beat 'talent'.

For context, we obviously use our main character Soh Ruiyong, who comes from a background of 31:15 10000m speed. We are not talking about a guy already running say 29:50 for 10000m working also already very hard, and still looking to continue even more 'hardwork' to surmount the difference to 29:25, the supposed benchmark of 'talent' in the definition above. We are talking about a drastically slower guy who is only running 31:15 on the track with MORE THAN his maximum effort, as illustrated by the race video of 2 years ago on Flotrack where Ruiyong totally capitulated from physical and mental exhaustion at the end of the race! If that is the case, can Ruiyong with his 31:15 pb, with the support of already one of the best training ideologies and guidances from a very good elite distance coach and group be able to continue to work hard so that, according to him, 'hardwork' may beat 'talent'? And that means, he would be running sometime in the next 1,2, or 3 years, faster than 29:25, which would be 2 minutes faster than his current best? We of the blog, and any reasonable and knowledgeable distance running fan, coach, or competitor would obviously and completely reject such a notion. In fact, we of the blog, are even willing to wager that this man will not even run 1 min faster than 31:15, much less 2minutes faster! In fact, based on analysis of the entirety of Ruiyong's running career and trajectory, performances, emotional and mental thresholds and tendencies, and biomechanical style and efficiency, as well as some other work  and climate related factors when he returns to Singapore, we do not think he even has a high chance of ever coming within a split second of his 31:15 again!

HARD WORK DOESN'T BEAT TALENT BELOW A CERTAIN CUT-OFF STANDARD! Can anybody disagree with that?! If yes, the onus is on you to prove it critically/theoretically/practically, for the sport of distance running only!

We would like every single Singaporean and non Singaporean runner, coach, parent, fan, competitor of distance sport, to stop promulgating notions such as these above without more critical thinking and analysis like we have done above, especially if you are well educated and have better ability to filter information and knowledge, and/or, differentiate reality from illusion, right from wrong, good from bad, morally and ethically!

Instead, we propose the existence of TALENT BANDS! There must be a band of runners of a certain ability by a certain age and perhaps also of a certain cultural heritage, who one would consider to be above the cut-off standard so that all their hard work may PROBABLY reap some small or large dividends! As you can see, being above the cut-off still doesn't guarantee hard work beats talent! And we speak mostly in probabilistic terms because so many other factors are at work still. We propose that for a senior runner in SEA to run 29:25 one fine day in his career, he needs to graduate from highschool at the tender age of 18 years or 19 years old with a pb for 10000m in the region of 30-31 minutes. This would be called a TALENT BAND! A runner falls into this talent band if he comes from either vietnam, phillipines, singapore, burma, cambodia, laos, indonesia, malaysia, east timor, brunei, and is at most 19 years old and has run 30-31minutes in a 10k track(or road) race. Needless to say, Ruiyong at 18-19 years old, was nowhere near this BAND. In fact he was 4 BANDS away in the high 34min region. For him, no amount of hard work is ever going to cause him to beat a talent of Agus' stature, or run times close to 29:25! If he is going to prove this wrong to all of us, and insist, in his delusion, that hard work beats talent(whatever else that means to him), we wish him all the best in what we definitely believe is futile.

At last word, we heard Ruiyong is hell bent on giving one last push for qualifying for Rio, by way of the Gold Coast Airport marathon 2016, in which Agus Prayogo is also entered(according to his instagram). We have spoken quietly to everybody in the knowledgeable local distance running community, and a quick survey of opinions in general showed that 9 in 10 conversations were totally disagreeable and expressed shock and abhorrence at his naivety! We have no reason to lie about this and our meticulously objective analyses in all our posts speak for themselves. Whoever is overseeing his running career at the moment, probably doesn't have enough influence in Ruiyong's life to prevent him from trying to qualify for Rio again in Gold Coast. That includes his PR agent Nicholas and his personal coach and assistant Ian. Even our own athletics association SAAA exponent C kunalan has questioned Ruiyong's questionable moral and ethical choices over the last few months of his running career, to no avail---no remorse and recourse by Ruiyong and his team at Blackdot. He thinks he can get in and out of the marathon game like an 800m or 1500m race---haphazardly putting together what he thought was a solid training block of 5-6 weeks, in between gingerly managing injuries and being injured and sometimes not training at all due to pain and discomfort, when real solid professional runners like Eliud Kipchoge settle for no less than 16-20 weeks except in this olympic year where the amount of time between the end of the London marathon and the Rio marathon allows for no more than a meagre 12 weeks of actual preparation. At his level, is this not showing any respect for the distance? Because this isn't an 800m or 1500m playtoy, and he knows that! He knows that the marathon distance is an extreme extension which requires months upon months of physical and mental practice to perfect, whereby any small chink in the armor, or weakness, is going to be amplified multi-fold----and he knows this! 

Question of the day: how does he act so obstinately dumb? 

It's a no-brainer outcome at Gold Coast, just as it was in London: Soh Ruiyong is not qualifying by merit of time(sub 2:19). There could be a window of chance with regards to the national marathon record, but even with our best optimism, we think that is a long shot as well. A really long shot...