Rethinking Road Racing Standards: Comparing New York Road Runners Race Results to Running Industry Standards

Author

• Jennie Coughlin, CUNY Graduate CenterFollow

Date of Degree

9-2026

Document Type

Master's Capstone Project

Degree Name

Master of Science

Program

Data Analysis & Visualization

Advisor

Timothy Shortell

Subject Categories

Categorical Data Analysis | Sports Studies

Keywords

road racing

Abstract

Running has undergone a third boom in participation since 2020, driven largely by people seeking fitness options that were outside and socially distanced during the COVID-19 pandemic. Social media has also allowed runners from groups that did not traditionally participate to find community. As the road racing population has expanded to include more people, some road racing industry standards have not kept up. This project assesses what the road racing community looks like and measures industry standards against the community of participants to see what changes in those standards would be needed to make them inclusive for all participants.

To build the dataset, I scraped four years (2022-2025) of New York Road Runners race results at three distances: 5K, 4 miles and 10K. The years align with the general return to racing after the 2020 coronavirus pandemic as well as changes by NYRR in late 2022 to lengthen the course time limits for many races. The dataset includes more runners of color and runners with disabilities than most races, and the course time limits solve a typical problem with race results data, which is that slower runners are discouraged

from ever entering if they aren’t fast enough to meet those limits. The analysis compares the population of NYRR finishers to several common running industry standards, including Couch to 5K, NYRR race corrals and RRCA guidelines for possible paces for running. It identifies places where the actual population of road racers diverges from those standards and recommends changes to include most or all of runners. A companion website presents the findings through a scrollytelling narrative, a series of charts and policy recommendations. The website is available at https://coughlinjennie.github.io/roadracing/ . All code, data and documentation are deposited at https://github.com/coughlinjennie/roadracing and at CUNY Academic Works.

Recommended Citation

Coughlin, Jennie, "Rethinking Road Racing Standards: Comparing New York Road Runners Race Results to Running Industry Standards" (2026). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/6853