I'm not sure how much I trust those stats. If you look at parkrun results, 25 minutes is definitely not the top 10%. I imagine you're familiar with parkrun, but

I'm not sure how much I trust those stats. If you look at parkrun results, 25 minutes is definitely not the top 10%. I imagine you're familiar with parkrun, but just in case: parkrun is a weekly, non-competitive, just for fun 5k -- with millions of participants, and all their stats are online. I picked a bunch of random events from last week's parkrun, and for most of them, ~>1/3rd finish in <=25 mins and very few of those times are PBs. I'd be absolutely shocked if being able to do a 5k in 25 mins puts you in the top 10% of runners, in fact, I'd go as far as to say, I think the majority of runners could do a 25min 5k -- where "runner" means "someone who runs regularly" (once per week, which parkrun is representative of). Click a town name in the "event" column on this page to see various results (includes gender and age group) you can also click through to individual profiles: https://www.parkrun.org.uk/results https://www.parkrun.org.uk/results If we expand the definition of "runner" to include anyone who runs at least once per year, I think maybe you'd get to the 10% figure you're quoting. The other possibility is that the page you've linked is using marathon times and extrapolating out from those to get 5k times, which is not going to produce accurate results.