Ironman Lake Placid 2018: Age Group Results and Kona Qualification
This week’s race analysis is for Ironman Lake Placid. There are no major course alteration to account for this time – it’s a straight forward comparison with past performances. Lake Placid is a large race with around 2,300 athletes racing for 40 Kona slots on offer to age groupers. This year’s race appears to have been on the slower side for the course.
I’ve spotted inconsistencies in my copy of the 2014 result set from Lake Placid, so have excluded that data from this analysis.
This year’s results very clearly trend much slower than the amalgamated results of the previous 10 years. The biggest shift appears on the bike, but the run is also slower and as a consequence we see quite a big difference in the overall distribution too. The shift appears to be consistent from front to mid and back of pack. There’s a lot of weight in numbers towards the right of the distributions.
DNF levels on the bike are on the high side for Lake Placid – higher than we’ve seen over the decade. run DNf figures are typical for the race, clearly the bike presented the biggest challenge of the day. Allowing for the fact that older data often includes DNS numbers as well I’d view this year’s race as having slightly higher than average DNF rates.
Age group medians largely follow the same pattern as the distributions. Bike splits are consistently slower, but run splits are more varied with instances where they trend faster.
Lake Placid doesn’t tend to draw too many competitors from outside North America and it keeps the slots there too.
Tracking times for specific placings across the age groups shows that in most cases there’s a slow down this year, pushing this race towards the slow end of the spectrum. That said, it’s not true of every division, for example M45-49 is comparable with previous results.From the distribution it’s clear that the overall pattern was slower, but within some age groups this is less evident.
Based on the start numbers I’ve estimated the slot allocation and from that the final qualifier times. These numbers may vary an the final qualification time will depend on roll down too. You can compare Lake Placid with other Ironman races on my Kona qualification page.
Finally the top twenty times within each age group. For the most part these are slower than average, but the change here is smaller than we saw at the median. It’s also inconsistent with some age groups trending closer to, or faster than, the average. Overall it does look like it was a slower year for the Lake Placid course, but some of the impact on the results distribution comes from a larger mid to back of pack.
You can access a spreadsheet of the full results from Ironman Lake Placid 2018 on my Google Drive.
