Marathon runners hoping to improve their running times may need to avoid participating in races that take place on one particular spring day each year. A new University of Georgia research paper co-authored by Patrick O’Connor, professor in the Mary Frances Early College of Education’s Department of Kinesiology, details the effects on marathon run performance when taking place on daylight saving time transition days. Patrick O’ Connor The paper, “Marathon run performance on daylight savings time transition days: results from a natural experiment,” was published in the journal “Chronobiology International” in September 2021. O’Connor co-authored the paper with Mihaela Kancheva, a college alumna and current medical student at the University of Central Florida. “Because shifting clocks by even one hour in the spring and fall temporarily disrupts sleep and mood, we wondered if human performance also would be disrupted,” O’Connor said. O’Connor and Kancheva obtained average run times for all finishers in marathon runs on the spring and fall daylight saving time transition days from a database for the years 2000-2018. They also compared runs on the same marathon courses when they were not held on a daylight saving time transition day. … I speculate that slowed run time in…
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Does daylight saving time affect marathon runners? – UGA Today
