World's fastest recreational runners

Who are the world's fastest slower runners? A new analysis of more than a million recreational marathon participants at major marathons around the world finds that the world's swiftest amateur marathoners do not share the same nationalities as the world's elite racers, many of whom come from East Africa.

But while much is known and has been written about the finishing times and home countries of the world's top professional marathoner runners, far less attention has been devoted to ordinary middle- and back-of-the-pack marathon runners globally.

So for the new analysis, which was funded by and published on the noncommercial website www.RunRepeat.com on Monday, statisticians in Denmark adopted the simple strategy of gathering databases about participants from many large marathons.

The answers yielded surprises. The nation with the fastest recreational runners, on average, turned out to be Spain, where the average marathon finishing time was an impressive 3 hours 55 minutes, followed by Portugal at 3:59, Luxembourg at 4:00 and Iceland at 4:01. The nation with the world's most-leisurely marathon pace was the Philippines.

The US sat near the bottom of the list, 39th among the 47 nations included, with a national average finishing time of 4 hours 29 minutes. No East African nations, for instance, made the list, although most of the globe's top professional marathon racers were born there.

©2015 The New York Times