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Six-Day Footraces in the Post-Pedestrianism Era

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Six-Day Footraces in the Post-Pedestrianism Era Draft version January 17, 2019 Typeset using LATEX twocolumn style in AASTeX62 Six-Day Footraces in the Post-Pedestrianism Era Greg Salvesen1 1Department of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA. (Accepted January 14, 2019) Submitted to Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports ABSTRACT In a six-day footrace, competitors accumulate as much distance as possible on foot over 144 consec- utive hours by circumambulating a loop course. Now an obscure event on the fringe of ultra running and contested by amateurs, six-day races and the associated sport of pedestrianism used to be a lu- crative professional athletic endeavor. Indeed, pedestrianism was the most popular spectator sport in America c. 1874{c. 1881. We analyzed data from 277 six-day races spanning 37 years in the post-pedestrianism era (1981{2018). Men outnumber women 3:1 in six-day race participation. The men's (women's) six-day world record is 644.2 (549.1) miles and the top 4% achieve 500 (450) miles. Adopting the forecasting model of Godsey (2012), we predict a 53% (21%) probability that the men's (women's) world record will be broken within the next decade. Keywords: ultra running, pedestrianism, record forecasting 1. INTRODUCTION sparked the six-day race craze, which would become ex- The now forgotten mega-sport of pedestrianism | tinct by c. 1889. multi-day walking/running races and exhibitions | en- There are at least four major historical works on joyed a short-lived place in the spotlight of American pedestrianism that deserve mentioning. Osler & Dodd and European sports history. Athletes competed for (1979) provide one of the first accounts of pedestrian- prize purses exceeding the equivalent of US $1 million to- ism's history, with a focus on the popular six-day race, day in six-day long \go-as-you-please" footraces, which and draw parallels between pedestrianism and the then- evolved from \heel-and-toe" walking matches. The six- emerging sport of ultra running. Marshall(2008) gives day race was the pedestrianism main event, which fre- the most comprehensive chronological report of pedes- quently drew huge crowds exceeding 10,000 people and trianism, with an impressively detailed play-by-play of spanning all socioeconomic classes. These six-day races individual races and exhibitions. Algeo(2014) highlights were usually staged on indoor tracks, which were typ- the major events from the pedestrianism hey-day, dis- 1 cussed in the context of the political and social atmo- ically =8-mile in circumference, at major venues such as the Madison Square Garden in New York and the sphere of the time. Hall(2014) presents the achieve- arXiv:1901.04610v2 [stat.AP] 16 Jan 2019 Agricultural Hall in London. ments of the female \pedestriennes," who also held ex- The first significant six-day race in the pedestrianism hibitions and competed in six-day races. era, billed as \The Great Walking Match for the Cham- After roughly a 90 year hiatus, six-day footraces resur- pionship of the World," was between Edward Payson faced in the United States following the marathon boom Weston and Daniel O'Leary at the Interstate Exposi- of the 1970's, but this revival pales in comparison to tion Building in Chicago from November 15{20, 1875. the popularity of the six-day event in the pedestrianism At the end of six days, O'Leary reached 503.3 miles to era. The \Spirit of '80 6-Day Race" was the first docu- Weston's 451.6 miles. This Weston vs. O'Leary rivalry mented six-day race in the modern era, being organized and won by Don Choi with 401 miles in Woodside, Cal- ifornia on an outdoor dirt track from July 4{10, 1980 Corresponding author: Greg Salvesen (Dietrich 2010). Approximately 200 six-day races have [email protected] been staged worldwide since then, with the first 500+ 2 Salvesen (2019) mile performance in the modern era by Mike Newton cause participation in six-day races was very low during (505.1 miles) in Nottingham from November 8{14, 1981 this time and we assume that any noteworthy perfor- (Deutsche Ultramarathon Vereinigung 2019). The six- mances would have been recorded and ultimately listed day race is the longest fixed-time event recognized by on DUV. Therefore, our adopted dataset includes all six- both the IAU (International Association of Ultrarun- day race performances listed on DUV with start dates ners 2019) and the USATF (United States Association from the beginning of 1981 through the end of 2018. of Track and Field 2019). This, along with the historical The IAU and USATF are currently the governing bod- relevance of pedestrianism and the growing popularity of ies for official record keeping of ultra running perfor- the six-day race among ultra runners, justifies a focused mances internationally and in the United States, respec- study of this fringe event in the modern era. tively. These organizations attempt to standardize ultra In this paper, we are interested in quantifying the running events and vet individual performances. How- legacy of pedestrianism and predicting the future of the ever, this process can be political and cumbersome for six-day race. We collect all available results from six- athletes and race organizers, causing many likely legiti- day races in both the modern and pedestrianism eras mate performances to be deemed unofficial. In this pa- (x2). Focusing first on the overall growth of the mod- per, we are concerned with analyzing all available six- ern six-day event, we present participation and perfor- day race performances. Therefore, we consider the IAU mance trends (x3). We next shift our attention to ana- and USATF standards to be irrelevant and instead treat lyze exceptional six-day performances and the evolution equally all performances available in the DUV database. of world records (x4). We then use a probabilistic model We also collect all available final standings from six- in an attempt to forecast short-term and long-term fu- day races in the pedestrianism era (1874{1888), which ture world record performances (x5). Finally, we discuss we only use for record forecasting in x5. Obtaining these our results and conclude (x6). data required combing through Marshall(2008) page- by-page to retrieve the results from 75 six-day races and 2. DATA exhibitions. We collected modern era six-day race data from the DUV online database (http://statistik.d-u-v.org/; Deutsche Ultramarathon Vereinigung 2019), which 3. PARTICIPATION AND PERFORMANCE hosts a comprehensive set of results and statistics for We begin our analysis by considering overall partici- ultra running races worldwide. For a given six-day pation and performance trends of modern six-day races. race, DUV provides (when available): name of the race, The points in Figure1 show the final mileage achieved host country, start/finish date, number of finishers, from every individual performance in our dataset. The whether the results are complete or partial, and various NM = 4595 blue (NW = 1564 red) data points corre- informative notes. For a given participant, DUV pro- spond to men's (women's) results and there are 2341 vides (when available): overall placement, performance, unique participants (1753 men, 588 women). name, nationality, hometown, year of birth, age group, The histogram on the top of Figure1 gives the evo- and gender. We collected this information for 277 races lution of participation with time and shows that there with durations of six days or longer (243 have complete have been > 200 six-day race performances each year results, 34 have partial results). Of these 277 races, since 2007, with men outnumbering women 2.7:1 over 97 are six-day splits from longer races and itemized in this time period. Interest in the six-day event is cur- parentheses as follows: 7-day (8), 8-day (5), 10-day (23), rently experiencing an all-time high, with the most re- 700-mile (13), 1300-mile (12), 1000-mile (20), 3100-mile cent year 2018 having 448 total participants (311 men, (11), and other events (5). We make no distinctions 137 women) and 417 unique participants (291 men, 126 between complete results, partial results, and six-day women). We use a non-linear least squares method to splits in our subsequent analysis. fit the participation data with the population growth The 1981 Nottingham race mentioned in x1 is the first model, N (t) = N0 exp [r (t − t0)], where N (t) is the six-day race entry on DUV. However, there were at least number of participants at time t measured in calendar three six-day races held prior to this event (e.g., Camp- years and t0 = 1981:5 yr is the time bin containing the bell 1988), but we do not include these due to the limited first modern six-day race in our dataset. The black line information regarding the results. While there were cer- shows the best fit model, whose parameters with esti- tainly other six-day races undocumented on DUV (par- mated uncertainties are an initial population N0 = 25±4 ticularly in the 1980{90's), their omission in our analysis and a population growth rate r = 0:082 ± 0:005 yr−1. should not significantly change our results. This is be- However, the flattening trend over the last seven years Six-Day Footraces in the Post-Pedestrianism Era 3 Figure 1. Scatter plot of all available modern six-day race performances over time. Blue circles (red squares) show the results for men (women). Large points connected by solid lines show the evolution of the modern era six-day world record. The top distribution shows the evolution in the number of participants over time and the black line is the best fit population growth model.
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