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Strange, I haven't really wanted to before but now I do.
I also think he is abusing statistics here. The average (mean) time is not what he should look at because he is including all runners in there, the elite as well as the amateurs. So as you add more amateurs to the pool, the times will get larger. But it is like looking at average income. If Bill Gates is in a bar, the average income in that bar will be about a billion dollars. Chances are everyone else in the bar makes a whole lot less. He should look at the trend of the elite runners over time, say the last 20 years and see if their average times are increasing or decreasing. When there are 37,000 people in a race, only a few hundred are really in it to win.
