My immediate interest in Ironman Florida stretched as far as the one athlete I had racing there. A few checks of the Athlete Tracker over the course of the evening, his race unfolding consistently if a little behind what we’d targeted. The 10 hour mark was missed, but the bike time includes both a puncture and a crash – we were close. Secondary to this was the idea of adapting the tool I’d built to extract the Ironman World Championship results from the Athlete Tracker to retrieve the data set for Florida. Purely curiosity, I don’t have a specific need for this data, but wanted to see how easy the process would be.
Twenty minutes after I woke this morning I had a working script busy retrieving over 3000 athletes from the Tracker. My original program was a hack, but updating the pattern matches to fit Florida’s athlete pages was simple, I’d even had time to throw in a few tweaks to better clean the data. Before breakfast I’d uploaded a complete spreadsheet of Ironman Florida 2012 Results and Splits to Google Drive. Being partisan I also separately uploaded the result set for those representing Britain or Ireland in Florida.
I don’t intend to pick apart the results to the same degree as Kona, the data is there for those who wish to look, I’m more interested in analysing my athlete’s power data. In the meantime I did waste a lazy Sunday morning producing a pair of graphs representing the male and female professional races. A spaghetti of lines similar to the charts of race position I produced for the Ironman World Championship. This time by using each athlete’s time deficit behind the leader the line shows not only ranking, but also the degree to which they trail.
Andrew Starykowicz hit the front earlier and stayed there. On the bike he opened a huge 20 minute lead on his competitors, we can see their lines rapidly fall as his lies flat along the top. That lead proved vital as his competitors gradually close in during the run, their lines rise approaching his position at the top, but they run out of road. His huge buffer on the bike ensured Starykowicz the win.
In the women’s field Yvonne Van Vlerken was the only athlete able to significantly close the gap Meredith Kessler opened early in the bike, the others falling back giving the pair a 15 minute advantage at T2. But on the run Van Vlerken leaves Kessler behind and few other women can regain any ground, her 15 minute lead remaining unthreatened through to the finish line.
That concludes my Florida analysis. At least for now. Although retrieving the data so easily has opened the idea of another project – there is a lot more data locked in the Athlete Tracker and it would be a relatively simple task to properly build my script to fetch any data. That in turn opens up the possibility of more throughly examining general trends in Ironman performances. I may have added to my busy schedule.
