We seem to be stuck in a run of slow Ironman races with Ironman Canada being the latest in that line. Cold and wets conditions on Sunday resulted in a distinctly slower race with times trending a good 20-30 minutes behind previous form. So a tough day of racing for its third year in Whistler.
The big difference in age group median times occurs on the bike, this is where the 2015 results are most consistently slower. While heat tends to impact most strongly on the run, wet or windy conditions have far more influence on bike times. So I’m not too surprised to see swim and run times fall inline with previous years of racing.
Viewing the results as distributions confirms how the bike is the critical factor in this year’s times. Swim and run distribute very closely with previous year’s but the bike is much slower with the overall times following in line.
Tracking times for different finishing positions over the last few years again shows this years times to be slower than before, but given we’ve only 3 years of data it’s hard to see it as a huge outlier. Slower, but perhaps not that much slower.
Similarly looking at times for the top twenty in each age group shows that 2015 is slower than average (from a 2 year sample), but not that different from results in 2014. It varies with age group as to which of the two years was the slower. Levels of competition look to have largely remained the same though.
You can access a spreadsheet of the full results and splits for Ironman Canada 2015 on my Google Drive.
