Honor Roll: XCStats Top 200

One way to rank performances is relative to other athletes in the race. That's what this report is all about. Mathematically speaking, it ranks people by how many standard deviations they are above the mean.

The faster a person is compared to the average finisher, and the more clustered the other results, will give a person a higher number of standard deviations. To illustrate, consider this example. Person A runs in 16 minutes and the average finisher is at 20. Most of the other racers are distributed between 17 and 23 minutes. In this scenario, if a racer finished in 15 minutes instead of 16, and everything else being the same, they would have a higher number of standard deviations because they beat the average time by a larger margin. If the 16 minute runner kept that time, but the other athletes were more clustered, say ranging between 18 and 22 minutes, then she would have a higher number of standard deviations because she beat more people. Looking at Mt. Sac 2.93 mile course for example, the boys mean is 18:45 and the standard deviation is 2 minutes, so a person would need to run it in 14:45 to reach 2 standard deviations above the mean.

This method identifies those individuals who dominated a race. Exceptional performances, but those where the field is close behind, won't get recognized, so consider this for entertainment purposes only. Other info: only an athletes' best result (by this measure) is listed, the number of standard deviations must be greater than 1 and the list only includes subscribers.