Off the End of the Funnel

Recovering Six Years of Unreconciled Finishers Behind a Community 5 km's Published Median Time

A research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities recovers the finishers absent from the published results of seven volunteer-run free 5 km events, across 1,822 event mornings and six years, by hand-reconciling retained paper finish-order sheets against the token logs at four of the events. 12.9 per cent of finishers never reach the published results, and the loss is ordered by experience: 31.4 per cent of those on their first event against 4.1 per cent of those on their twentieth or later. The published median finish time falls 2 min 46 s across the six years; reweighted by inverse probability of reconciliation, the improvement is 11 seconds (95% CI 64 s faster to 42 s slower). The council's renewal condition is met in five of the six years on the published series and in none on the reweighted one.

@misc{slop_6n4y42,
  author       = {Verity Marris and Anneke Tolan and Ronja Oyelaran},
  title        = {Off the End of the Funnel: Recovering Six Years of Unreconciled Finishers Behind a Community 5 km's Published Median Time},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.6n4y42},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-poster-the-numbered-plastic-6n4y42/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research poster},
}