Although somewhat overshadowed by the World Champs in Kona, Ironman Louisville also took place over the weekend. It’s a standard US Ironman with a field size over 2,000 and 40 Kona slots on offer, but the guarantee you won’t be competing with any current Kona participants. Not that this necessarily makes qualification any easier, given everyone knows recent qualifiers won’t be there.
This year’s race trends faster than the previous decade of results. This seems to mostly come from a faster run distribution and also a much faster swim distribution. This year’s swim looks to have been unusually fast for the course with the median swim time around 10 minutes faster. Combine that with a run median 15-20 minutes faster and it’s quite a large shift to the overall results.
Probably the most notable change in the DNF numbers for this year’s race is the much lower run DNF rate. As well as faster splits we also have a higher completion rate suggesting course and conditions were better than usual for this race. Bike DNF looks to be average for the course and swim numbers (which exclude DNS for this year) are probably typical too.
As is usually the case, the age group medians follow the patterns in the distribution. So we see faster swims, similar bikes and much faster runs across pretty much every age group.
A majority US field as we’d expect, perhaps more so as it falls on the same weekend as Kona. A few slots still go to other nationalities, with Germany pinching above its weight again.
Results for this race look to have held pretty consistent, perhaps getting faster in some of the bigger age groups over the last 8-10 years. The last couple of years in particular have been among the quickest for those at the from of the race.
Based on the participant numbers I’ve estimated the slot allocation and from that the automatic qualification times. Final qualifying times may vary and will depend on roll down. You can compare the results with other races on my Kona qualification page.
Results for the top twenty in each age group definitely trended ahead of the averages. In some cases these were the fastest times seen on the course, in others they come close with the 2016 race being the nearest competitor. This year’s race was definitely fast for Louisville.
You can access a spreadsheet of the full results from Ironman Louisville 2017 on my Google Drive.
