Why Are American Women Running Faster Than Ever?

This repository contains code in R to replicate the following graphic:

Source

• Title: Why Are American Women Running Faster Than Ever? We Asked Them—Hundreds of Them

• Author(s): Talya Minsberg and Kevin Quealy

• Date: Feb 28, 2020

• From: New York Times

• URL: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/02/28/sports/womens-olympic-marathon-trials.html

• PDF: Why-Are-American-Women-Running-Faster-Than-Ever-NYT.pdf

Data

The source of the data (i.e. marathoners times) is World Athletics: https://worldathletics.org/.

Specifically, the women’s marathon times (dating back to 2001) are available in the following webpage:

https://worldathletics.org/records/toplists/road-running/marathon/all/women/senior/2001?regionType=world&page=1&bestResultsOnly=true&maxResultsByCountry=all&eventId=10229534&ageCategory=senior

Note that the data collection involves web crawling and scraping several pages from the above website.

All the R code used for this task is in the script web-scraping-world-athletrics.R, located in the folder data/ of this repository.

In this data/ folder, you’ll find various HTML files of the form marathon-women-yyyy.html where yyyy indicates a given year from 2001 to 2024.