The most common male names — David, James, Paul — read like a register from a mid-1970s British school. That tracks: most London Marathon runners are in their 40s, and GBR accounts for 81% of the field.

The female list skews slightly younger: Sarah leads, but Emma, Laura, and Hannah point to a cohort born in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The surname list is the top 10 most common surnames in England — Smith, Jones, Williams — almost in rank order.

The fastest names are predominantly European — Guillaume, Marcin, Julien, Tomasz, Michal, Antoine. That is not a coincidence: France, Poland, and Spain produce disproportionately fast runners relative to their field size (see the Countries page), and their common first names dominate this list.

The slowest list is almost entirely female names — Maureen, Stacy, Jacqui, Sylvia, Aimee. This reflects the gender pace gap, not anything name-specific.

Minimum 50 runners per name. These are averages — influenced by the demographic mix behind each name, not anything causal.

These runners share an identical full name. Every row below is a group of real people who registered as the same name — and ran completely different races.

The largest gap in the dataset belongs to the 33 people named Sarah Jones, whose finish times span from 3:08 to 9:35 — a gap of over six hours.