The second Ironman of last weekend was Ironman Boulder. Another mid-sized race that comes with a standard 40 Kona slot allocation. Boulder has the additional challenge of altitude which makes for a tougher races for athletes travelling from sea level. With strong front of pack competition this tends to result in a broad spread of results from the course.
This year’s results were slightly faster than the amalgamated historical results. This is especially the case at the front of the race with the top 5% trending 20-30 minutes faster than the past. The major contributor appears to be a faster than usual run.
The faster run also has a much lower DNF rate than recent years. After two years with high drop out rates Boulder appears to have settled a to a more reasonable level. Although, this is still towards the higher end for Ironman courses.
Age group medians largely reflect the trends from the distribution with a much faster set of run medians and also faster bike medians in most age groups.
The majority of athletes come from North America and they keep hold of most of the slots. A small spread of other nationalities claimed a handful too.
Tracking times for specific age groups positions shows that in the largest age groups the front of the pack has been quite consistent over the last 6 years. Further back there’s more variability with 2017 and 2018 being particularly slow for the mid to back of pack athletes.
Based on the athlete list I’ve calculated the Kona slot allocation for Ironman Boulder and from that the automatic qualification times in each age group. The allocation may vary slightly and roll downs will influence final qualifying times. You can compare this with other races on my Kona qualification page.
The times fo the top twenty in each age group trend around the average or slightly better in some cases. Overall this year’s front of pack results come in faster than average and towards the fastest.
You can access a spreadsheet of the full results from Ironman Boulder 2019 on my Google Drive.
