Histogram of PBP finishing times for U.S. riders

[Nicholas Bull]

Attached (I hope) are two histograms: one showing how many U.S. riders arrived at the finish of PBP in each one-hour time slot, the other showing the percent of U.S. riders arriving in each one-hour time slot.

I made this right after Don posted his original message about "PBP Results Viewer" on Sept 9th, so it doesn't reflect any subsequent revisions to the data (if there were any).  The data do not include DNF riders, of course, but they do include DNQ riders who didn't finish in time, potentially including 80-hour or 84-hour riders who did not finish by their time limit.

Sorry for the U.S.-centric view.  I'm sure that someone with more "skilz" than me can put together an all-riders histogram in a jiffy, but putting this together using my primitive approach involved a lot of hand-counting of riders in hourly time slots so it took awhile even with only 351 U.S. finishers to count.

Jan Heine commented that it seemed there was less bunching at the time limit than in 2007.  I think I've seen similar histograms for 2007 somewhere, and there was a larger proportion arriving in the 89th and subsequent hours.  Here, the 87th hour was the peak arrival hour with 14.5 percent of the riders, and the 88th hour was just a little smaller while there is a significant dropoff in the 89th hour.  An all-riders histogram might tell a different story, of course.  And it would be interesting to see similar histograms for just the 80-hour, 84-hour, and 90-hour riders.  Only 14 riders came in during the 82nd and 83rd hour, while 9 arrived during the 84th hour.  If these nine were 84-hour riders, presumably they are DNQ'd?  (Two were listed as arriving at 84:00:00.  Does that qualify or do you have to have arrived at or before 83:59:59?)

Nick

[Nicholas Bull]

OK, I thought about it for a few minutes and saw how easy it is to make a worldwide histogram.

So attached are two histograms: one showing how many worldwide riders arrived at the finish of PBP in each one-hour time slot, the other showing the percent of worldwide riders arriving in each one-hour time slot.

I think the worldwide percentage histogram is telling a pretty-similar story to the US percentage histogram.

The data source is Don Bennet's unofficial results viewer as of a few minutes ago.

Nick

>  pbp_finishers.pdf
> 9KViewDownload
>
>  pbp_finishers_percent.pdf
> 7KViewDownload

[Bruce...@gdc4s.com]

I haven't seen the histogram, but a preference among riders to finish in the daylight may factor into it.

 

On BMB, riders arriving at the last controle in the dark would often just stay there and sleep rather than push through to the finish (a wise decision, given road conditions at the time.)

 

- Bruce

[William deRosset]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: William deRosset <wmder...@gmail.com>
Date: 22 September 2011 15:57
Subject: Re: Histogram of PBP finishing times for U.S. riders
To: William deRosset <wmder...@gmail.com>

 And it would be interesting to see similar
histograms for just the 80-hour, 84-hour, and 90-hour riders.

Dear Nick,

Please see attached for 80, 84, and 90-hour histograms with two-hour bins (note: the 45h bin includes all riders finishing between 43h00 and 44h59, so technically it would have a 44h centered label...).  These are plain counts, but are illuminating nonetheless.

Cheers,

Will

William M. deRosset
Fort Collins, CO

[vdavis]

One of the things I ADORE about randonneuring is the abundance of
geeky guys who know how to do things like this.

On every brevet... duct tape... spreadsheets... now animated
histograms!

You make this sport awesome.

Thanks for this ;-)

Vaune Davis, Toronto