Abstract
The aim of this study was to analyse participation and performance trends across years of 12-hour and 24-hour ultra-runners. Age and running speed of all female and male finishers in the 12-hour and 24-hour run of Basel (Switzerland) were analysed between 1988 and 2012 using regression analysis and analysis of variance. Participation in the 24-hour run was higher with 1,904 total finishes (78.5%) compared to 523 total finishes (21.5%) in the 12-hour run. The number of finishes increased in the 12-hour run for both women (r^2 = 0.43; P < 0.01) and men (r^2 = 0.19; P < 0.05) while the number of finishes in the 24-hour run remained stable (P > 0.05). Running speed of the annual top three runners in the 12-hour run remained unchanged over time at 10.6 ± 0.8 km/h for men and 8.0 ± 0.5 km/h for women. In the 24-hour, running speed of the annual top three men tended to decrease (r^2 = 0.23; P = 0.02) from 10.5 km/h to 9.7 km/h, while it remained stable for the top three women at 7.7 ± 0.9 km/h. The sex difference in performance for the top three runners was 23.5 ± 7% in the 12-hour run and 20.2 ± 8.8% in the 24-hour run. The annual female winners were significantly younger (39.2 ± 7.9 years) than the annual male winners (44 ± 7.4 years) in the 12-hour run while there was no difference in age between annual male winners (44.7 ± 11.2 years) and annual female winners (43.7 ± 10.2 years) in the 24-hour run. To summarize, running speed for the annual fastest women and men remained stable across years for both races except for men in the 24-h run where running speed decreased over time. The sex difference in performance remained unchanged at ~20-23% for both 12-hour and 24-hour across years which appeared greater compared to existing reports on ultra-endurance events. The mean age of the fastest runners was between 38-45 years which corresponds to master runners. Future studies need to investigate what motivates more ultra-marathoners to compete in a 24-hour run than in a 12-hour run.
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