It’s going to be a busy week of race analysis – I’ll open it with Ironman Austria. Austria is a long standing race, known for its fast course and competitive times. It draws a field of around 2,500 and offers the standard 40 Kona slots for the fastest age groupers. It’s always one of the fastest courses on the circuit, but times have varied with conditions over the years – hot years causing particular trouble for athletes.
The first thing the distribution chart tells us is that this year was on the slower side for the course. Compared with the previous decade of results 2018 skews about 20 minutes slower at the median; this appears to come from a combination of slower bike and run. It’s also present across the field with the top 5% similarly slowed. The swim trends differently, with faster median times, but no change to front of pack times.
The main thing I’d pick out form the DNF data is that the run DNFs were higher this year. Not at the 2012 level – a particularly hot year as I recall, but a jump on the usual figures. Bike numbers look typical for the course and swim numbers are where I’d expect them. Of course, it’s important to remember that a lot of data from previous years mixes DNS and DNF which boosts their swim and overall percentages.
As you’d expect the age group medians follow the same trend as the distributions with slower times for bike and run this year which slightly faster for swim.
Austria is a well established race that draws wide field form Europe and beyond. The slots get divided amongst those nationalities with Austria taking places proportional to their numbers.
There’s been some variation in times by age group placing over the years, but generally Austria is quite consistent in its largest age groups. 2012 was an especially slow year that stands out. This year is definitely slower than most recent races, but not as extreme as 2012.
Based on the start list I’ve estimated the Kona slot allocation and from that the automatic qualifying times in age groups. Exact numbers may vary and roll down will affect the final times. You can compare this with other races on my Kona qualification page.
At least for the male age groups the top twenty times tended to be slower than average. this puts them in line with the distribution at the start of the analysis and these are the age groups that make the majority of the field. Older men, over 50s and most female age groups trend closer to the average though with one or two posting better times.
You can access a spreadsheet of the full results from Ironman Austria 2018 on my Google Drive.
