> One of the most common comments I've seen online about this graph and/or this paper is that this is due to pace runners provided by the marathon. Section 4.4 of the paper gives multiple explanations for why this cannot be the case, once again indicating that people tend to comment without reading the paper.
Note that this is about comments on the paper itself. Somebody reading this article could not reasonably be expected to have read the paper before commenting on it, not least of which because the link to it is dead (but also because reading a research paper before making a casual remark about a single graph in an article with many, wherein it is not remotely related to the main thesis of the article, is not a particularly reasonable expectation).
The quote is from the page in OP, its not necessary to circumvent the dead link to see the remark (not that finding the original article is very hard in any case).
Yes, I understand that the quote is from the article in the OP. The point is the quote is about people commenting on the paper. A comment on the article is not a comment on the paper, and it's entirely reasonable to leave a comment on the article without reading an auxiliary paper that is both not directly available and not relevant to the larger point of the article.
> Runners who were on pace to finish between 3:45 and 3:55 or between 4:05 and 4:15 ran approximately 6%–8% slower in the last 2.195 kilometers. In contrast, runners who were on pace to finish close to the 4-hour mark (3:55–4:02) ran only 4%–6% slower in the last 2.195 kilometers. [...] Panel (b) of Figure 7 zooms out to show this normalized pace for runners across a wider range of 40-kilometer-pace times. The same qualitative pattern around 4 hours is observed at other round numbers in the distribution. Thus, there is clear evidence that runners finish the last 2.195 kilometers relatively faster when they are close to a round number than when they are farther away.
