Second race analysis of the week is Ironman Chattanooga. A mid to large race with just over 2,000 competitors for the standard 40 Kona slot allocation. This year’s race saw a cancelled swim which obviously impacts on the analysis and comparison of finishing times. As I’ve made no adjustments to result sets to compensate this will be a quick review.
I’ve also used the Kona slot allocation posted at the race rather than my estimates – as has been noted I’ve not been able to determine the current allocation formula, but where I’ve been sent slot allocations from the roll down I will use these instead.
There’s no swim data to compare here and because of that the overall times are also in the order of 1-2 hours faster than we’d expect. As such we’re limited to comparing the bike and run (and even then should note that the absence of a swim will have an impact on these). Bike times trend faster across the field this year and run times trend slower, particularly at the median.
Again the absence of a swim influences the DNF stats – the main thing we can note is that the run DNFs are a bit higher than we usually see. Only the exceptionally hot and humid 2016 race saw higher DNF rates at that stage.
Again, it’s tricky to compare medians, but what we can follows the patterns from the distributions. A faster bike and a slower run for most age groups.
Similar to Maryland this is a predominantly North American race and so holds most Kona slots there.
As the overall times are significantly faster due to the missing swim I’ve not done the usual position comparison, but have shown the past variation in times for age group places. Probably the most notable thing is that the race has been quite varied, with 2016’s tough conditions making for a notably slower year.
Slot allocations have kindly been provided by a competitor at roll down so these numbers are good prior to the roll down. Final qualifying times may vary where slots have rolled in age groups. You can compare this with other races on my Kona qualification page.
We finish as we started with a limited comparison. The top twenty times are all faster than in previous years because the race was shorter. They appear to follow a similar trend to previous years – the slope of the lines are comparable, but there’s not much more I can note here.
You can access a spreadsheet of the full results from Ironman Chattanooga 2018 on my Google Drive.
