Finishing up last weekend’s racing – a quick analysis of results from Ironman France. Four races in and I’m starting to get results fatigue so apologies to those who raced in Nice if this one is a little rushed. The short version of this post is that it was an average year in France; times are unexceptional for the course.
While preparing this analysis I discovered that 2010 results are missing from my database. I’m not sure why, they appear to be on the Ironman site. For this analysis though, they are excluded.
Medians are broadly comparable with no clear direction to any variance in the age group ranks. That leaves little to nothing to comment on – I said this one might seem rushed.
Again the split distributions are reasonably aligned. A closer look though suggests that this year’s race was slightly slower than the norm. Interestingly, although the margins are small, this appears to be the case across all three disciplines.
Checking how splits have varied over time at this race firstly reveals the missing 2010 data, but also shows that this year’s results sit comfortable amongst their peers. For many age groups the previous two years in Nice have been faster, but 2015 was far from a slow race on the course.
Even the front of pack don’t deviate too far from the averages. There are exceptions among the age groups, but of the results I’ve looked at this week France’s top performers most closely match the past. Most of the time we should expect this, changes in the competitive field are gradual and where conditions are normal then the variations in age group quality will largely cancel each other out yielding a results pattern much like before.
A spreadsheet of the full results and splits for Ironman France 2015 is available on my Google Drive.
