Zoe Rom cannot perform basic math, let alone determine strength of causality or anything else. Hence the need for her "data analysis" series

Free advertising for Strava doesn't have to be rolled into output this frankly embarrassing to not only the editor but Outside itself and whatever high school awarded Rom a diploma

“I love statistics,” burbled Zoe Rom, the editor-in-chief of both Trail Runner and Women’s Running, in a February 22 column for RUN, the only Outside running-centric publication Rom doesn’t nominally oversee. “I love that numbers can almost point us to objective truth and reason and make neat the messiness of real life.”

The article in which this claim is lodged, “Data Shows There’s No One Way to Train for a Marathon,” is part of a series devoted to analyzing Strava data that Rom started last May and is now eight stories too long. As you’ll see, this may likely be between ten and twelve—but probably not eleven—too many articles, all of which make undeniable “the messiness of real life.”

Today’s contribution to the series, “Here’s What Data Says About How to Run a Sub 2:00 Half Marathon,” is probably no better or no worse than any of the other articles in Rom’s series, all of which suggest that she never passed an algebra course. And evidently, Outside’s house style includes treating “data” as a singular noun, although in-universe this is like pointing out that someone with a smoldering, golf-ball-sized bullet hole in his forehead has somewhat disfigured features owing to a hint of a cleft chin.

That Strava’s datasets are both internally “noisy” and not representative of distance runners’ training generally is a flaw that would cripple the entire series by itself even were there nothing problematic about Rom’s “analyses” of this non-generalizable data. Fortunately, we can ignore this weakness altogether, because Rom, despite her affinity for numbers, can’t even compute basic percentages.

Rom describes the half-marathon as “just long enough and short enough to challenge every runner’s skill set and leave even the most experienced athlete gasping for air and tasting pennies.” It takes work to get “just long enough and short enough” from “just the right distance,” so she at least gets a point or two for her originality on that one.

This passage alone cements Rom’s lack of qualifications for even reading data analyses for comprehension, much less generating them herself:

Women who finished NYCM in 3:45-3:59 averaged 450 miles over the training cycle, versus 294 miles for the Brooklyn Half, representing a difference of 65 percent.

This is like saying that if Runner A logs 400 miles and Runner B logs 396 miles in the same period, then there's a 99-percent difference between their mileage totals. Since these two runners are logging nearly identical totals, doesn’t that feel “off” somehow? This putative stats geek doesn’t even understand fundamental terms.

The figure Rom seems to be after here is 56 percent. That is, if the marathon runners totaled 450 miles and the half-marathoners 294 miles, then the marathoners logged (450 − 294)/294 = 156/294 = 0.531 = 53.1 percent more. (Note that these are sixteen-week mileage totals, so neither group is doing any serious preparation for even a 10K race, at least according to their Strava activity. Note also that the e-mailed version of this included the incorrectly typed figure “56.1 percent,” the kind of mistake a tiny but determined segment of regular Beck of the Pack readers always notices and points out.) And if you want to know how much less the half-marathoners trained than the marathoners, rather than how much more the marathoners trained than the half-marathoners, then use the larger figure as a referent: (450 − 294)/450 = 156/450 = 0.347 = 34.7 percent.

No one should be reading garbage, but some of the things that legitimately amaze Rom and her fellow S.W.A.P. cult members owing solely to their status as dunce-yawping simpletons of privilege are uniquely entertaining. This one especially:

Strava data from sub-2 finishers shows that most runners were pretty evenly split between maxing out at a 10, 11, or 12-mile long run. There seems to be a slight preference towards even numbers, with more runners logging a 12- or 10-mile long run than an 11.

It apparently didn’t occur to Rom that the set of integers {10, 11, 12} contains twice as many even numbers as odd numbers, even given a visual aid that Rom presumably ordered herself. If it had, she might have maybe perhaps noticed—depending on factors—that a 2-to-1 ratio favoring even numbers was algorithmically expected in this challenging scenario, though making too many a priori assumptions can throw off things like averages and benchmarks because aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah.

Other highlights include “The sub-two-hour half is a much sought-after benchmark for amateur and age-group runners, akin to the sub-three-hour marathon” and this paragraph (oomphases mine):

The Grand Teton Half was also an outlier, with the lowest percentage of sub-two-hour finishers. This is partially due to the race’s altitude, which starts and ends in Jackson, Wyoming, 6,237 feet above sea level, but might also be because this is largely a destination race that attracts tourists who might want to yog a half marathon while soaking in mountain views.

Although uninformed and misinformed rambling about training data tends to converge on a certain jittery, say-nothing-definitive style, this looks suspiciously like the writing of David Roche, Rom’s coach and another enthusiastic data-miner who probably racked up about a 500 to a 550 on the math portion of his SAT, unless he paid someone to take the test for him. But yeah, I’m also on the fence as to what matters more here—the high altitude of the setting or the casual attitudes of the entrants.

I decided to try this method of analysis out for myself, and I quote:

The Pikes Peak Ascent is also an outlier among half-marathons, with very few sub-two-hour finishers. This might be because the race starts at an elevation higher than Jackson, Wyoming’s 6,237 feet and gains over 7,800 vertical feet. But it could also be the race being 13.3 miles long, considerably longer than a true 13.1-mile half-marathon.

But it could also be because so many treat the PPA as a destination event and just want to soak in the views of the Rockies. People who run it with sand-filled backpacks run even slower, perhaps because they stop to take more pictures.

Yog it up, ZoZo. This stuff is genuinely brightening up a few people’s Mondays.