Delayed, but not forgotten: Ironman Taiwan took place over a week ago now and I’m finally getting to my analysis. Taiwan is a smaller race and offers a slightly lower slot allocation of 35 slots for the 2019 Ironman World Championship. Conditions on race day mean this was another race with an altered course – in this case, a swim of only 400m to start the day. As before this limits the comparisons we can make with previous results.
The drastic shortening of the swim means there’s no real way to compare either the swim element or the overall splits from this year’s race. We can check bike and run against each other, but in the knowledge that many will have missed more than an hour of swim time beforehand. The bike trends much faster at the front of the field, but around the same at the median. The run trends faster across the field.
I’m surprised there were any DNFs for a 400m swim, but possibly people pulled out in T1 in the conditions of the day. Otherwise the DNF rate looks unexceptional for the race.
Median trends follow those of the distributions – variable bike splits and consistently faster run medians across the age groups. Beyond that the swim and the overall can’t be compared.
The majority of competitors come either from Taiwan or Japan. Japan looks to take most of the available slots with Australia taking the next biggest chunk.
There’s huge variation in age group times over the four years of racing – not least due to this year’s shortened swim. The smaller field size also makes for greater variation in performances as you go further back in each age group.
Based on the starting numbers I’ve estimated the Kona slot allocation for each age group – actual numbers may have varied. From this I’ve calculated the qualification time in each age group before roll down. You can compare this with other races on my Kona qualification page.
There’s not much to comment on for the top twenty in each age group. A shortened swim and for the front of the pack a faster bike and run after ensures the times are well ahead of the averages in all, but the smallest age groups.
You can access a spreadsheet of the full results from Ironman Taiwan 2018 on my Google Drive.
