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!
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
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