Fig. 4

KsA values as a function of performance time at the shorter distance of a pair of non-neighboring distances, derived from personal best times of male runners at international, national and regional levels. Personal best times of male runners at international (World, Europe), national (Great Britain, Germany) and regional (two German states) level, listed for three distances (100 m/200 m/400 m, 800 m/1500 m/3000 m, 1500 m/3000 m/5000 m, 3000 m/5000 m/10,000 m) were used to calculate KsA values (mean ± SD) for the distance pairs 100 m/400 m (A), 800 m/3000 m (B), 1500 m/5000 m (C) and 3000 m/10,000 m (D). The times (mean ± SD) shown for the shorter distances of each distance pair correspond, from left to right, to the international, national and regional performance categories. The upper dashed lines represent the 75th percentile (P75) and the lower dashed lines represent the 25th percentile (P25) of the theoretical KsA values (Tab. S04, formula 2). These theoretical KsA values were calculated by successively multiplying the empirical single KsA values obtained from performances over neighboring distances of German male runners (Table 1). A linear regression analysis was used to test whether the KsA values were dependent on the performance time over the lower distance of each distance pair. The p-values indicate the significance of the deviation of the slope from zero. n.s., not significant. Underlying datasets/original data: C1–C6 (Tab. S02)/Tab. S19–S24.