It’s a busy weekend of Ironman racing to review this week. To start things off I’m looking at Ironman Hamburg. Hamburg is a large race with over 2,000 competitors that comes with the standard allocation of 40 Kona slots for age group athletes. Although this is Hamburg’s third year of racing, comparison with past results is complicated by 2018 being converted to a duathlon format. I have separated out 2018 data at all times, direct comparison with 2017 results is more straight forward.
Swim and bike distributions in 2019 compare quite closely with those from 2017. It’s the run where changes start to happen and we have a slower run distribution than in the previous year. This leads on to a somewhat slower overall distribution of results in 2019. Comparing bike and (second) run with 2018 we see a significantly faster bike in 2018, but a similar run distribution.
DNF rates were higher this year when compared with 2017. Overall DNF up over 10% starting to push towards the higher end of the Ironman scale. 2018 had the lowest DNFs of any year, but was a shorter overall race for most. Also worth noting that the DNF data needs a review for 2018 as there’s not a clear picture of where athletes DNFed.
Medians tend to follow the patterns shown in the distributions. In this case we see slower run times in age groups when we compare 2019 with 2017. I’ve included the 2018 medians for comparison too. As in the distributions we see faster bike splits and run times more comparable to 2019.
As usual a wide spread of nationalities raced in Hamburg with slots divided well among them.
Tracking age group times for specific positions over the three years shows how much faster 2018 was with a duathlon format. It also shows that 2019 does tend to be slightly slower than 2017 for finishing times. It’s too small a data set to be picking out patterns, especially with the alterations in 2018.
Based on start numbers I’ve calculated the Kona slot allocation and from that the automatic qualification times in each age group. Given some age groups had no finishers roll down certainly happened and would have changed the slots in some groups. You can compare this with other Ironman races on my Kona qualification page.
I’ve limited my look at the top twenty times in each age group to 2019 and 2017. Broadly most times in the top twenties were slower this year, but this isn’t always the case, particularly as you move to the very front of the age groups. Women’s age group probably trend a little closer to their 2017 top twenty, while the men are more likely to be slower until the top 5 or in some cases 10.
You can access a spreadsheet of the full results from Ironman Hamburg 2019 on my Google Drive.
