A few Trends

As if there are not enough distractions on the Internet!

Google have now produced a tracker tool which allows you to monitor the trend in queries over the past few years. There are no absolute numbers but the graph shows the relative volume of the query, over time. Underneath is a graph of related news stories. It is also possible to compare a number of searches e.g. see the relative interest in Saucony and New Balance

A search for "marathon" looked like this:

This shows a big peak around the time of London and Boston and a smaller hump for New York. If you look at the results for the UK

you can see that New York just does not register -we all know that for non-runners in this country there is only one marathon. The big peak is for the 2005 race when Paula Radcliffe made her very public pit stop – so you can see what really grabs the public imagination about our sport.

A search of "marathon training" shows how the curiousity is translated into a more practical interest. The graph for UK search shows an interesting pattern. The people committed to a spring marathon are preparing in November/December, as you would expect, but most people look at the time of the London Marathon. So it obviously does a good job of piquing interest – people want to know what's involved.

None of this is surprising, but like all statistics, confirmation of assumptions is always useful.

This tool was developed to monitor trends in diseases, to see how much internet queries mirrored infection rates. It is a surprisingly good proxy for mapping their spread. So I thought I would compare the rates for a very typical running injury – shin splints

The season is more pronounced in the World results than those for the UK but it is interesting how steady the pattern is for both. Every year we all bounce up full of enthusiasm, over-train and get injured. At the end of the year, with less training, the injury clears. Shin splints tend to be more frequent in new runners so these graphs probably show a steady influx of people starting to run. The graph would also suggest that there have been no great developments in shoe technology, which have reduced the incidence of injury.

Again nothing startling but you can fool yourself into thinking you are discovering things