Ironman Hamburg is the final race analysis of the week. This is only the second year for Hamburg and unfortunately it fell victim to the hot summer with high algae levels cancelling the swim. The race went ahead in a duathlon format opening with a 6km run. Last minute alteration aside, Hamburg drew a field of around 2,000 athletes to compete for 40 age group Kona slots.
It’s taken a little more time to get hold of the full details of the results for this race, but I’ve extracted and merged them from the Ironman site and the results PDF they’ve provided. There’s a link to a spreadsheet at the end of this article. Obviously, it’s also more difficult to compare the results when the two events differ so much.
What we can say for certain is a 6Km run is a much faster start to an Ironman than a 3.8km swim. After that this year’s race saw significantly faster bike splits than in 2017 – a top 10% bike split last year was only top 25% this year. The bike looks to have been around 25 minutes faster at the median. On the other hand the marathon trended slower this year, although only by a matter of 5 minutes at the median. The quicker opening leg and large shift of bike splits produces much faster finish times overall.
I put a little time into looking at the data from the first run to see if I could show any impact on the race, haven’t produce anything of significance. You’ll probably be unsurprised to know that people ran a lot faster over the 6K than the marathon. I can’t say how much the faster bike splits or slower marathon splits are a consequence of opening with a short run instead of a swim though.
Unfortunately the results as provided do not clearly indicate where athletes dropped out of the race (i.e. no times are given if an athlete DNFed). So I can only comment on the overall level of DNF at this race which was slightly lower than in 2017.
Again, it’s difficult to compare the medians for each age group other than to note the much faster bike medians and slower marathon medians this year.
Hamburg drew a wide-ranging field of athlete, but kept most of the slots at home.
There’s little to really say here, the race alterations made for a much faster event and so we see much faster qualifying times across all age groups.
Finally, I’ve estimated the allocation of Kona slots and from that final qualifying times. Actual numbers may have varied and roll down would impact on final qualifying times. You can compare this with other races on my Kona qualification page.
You can access a spreadsheet of the full results from Ironman Hamburg 2018 on my Google Drive.