The second analysis of the week is for Ironman Lake Placid 2019, a large and long standing US race that comes with the standard 40 Kona slots for age group athletes. This year’s race looks to have been a little more challenging with slower times and a higher DNf rate that normal for the course.
Due to some irregularity in splits I’ve excluded my 2014 result set form some of this analysis
To start the analysis I’ll compare the distribution of split times at the 2019 race with the amalgamated results from the previous decade (2014 excluded). As stated this was a slower year for Lake Placid with bike and run distributions trending behind past results. The bike appears to have been 5-10 minutes slower at the median and the run around 20-30 minutes slower. This leads to a shift of around 30-40 minutes at the median for the race.
The DNF rate this year was unusually high for the course. At close to 15% this is heading into unusually high territory for DNF rates. Both bike and run DNFs were higher than usual for the course. You can compare this with other races and find out more about DNF rates here.
Individual age group medians generally follow the trends shown by their respective distributions. In this case median bike and run splits trend slower than in the previous decade of results (2014 excluded).
The majority of competitors come from the US or Canada with a small selection form elsewhere in the world. Kona slots appear to have mostly stayed in the US.
Tracking overall times for specific age group positions gives further indication of how this race compares with past events. This year’s results do appear to be towards the slower end of the spectrum for Lake Placid, although not too dissimilar to 2018 in many respects. This does vary with age group and position, but if we focus on the largest age groups (men 35 through to 50) then times are similar or slower to 2018 which puts this year as one of the slower years.
Based on the start list I’ve calculated the Kona slot allocation and from that automatic qualifying times in some age groups. As a number of divisions didn’t have any finishers there will be some roll downs on top of this so final numbers and times will have varied a little. You can compare this with other races on my Kona qualification page.
The top twenty charts are varied, but the majority show slower than average splits for the top twenty. As is often the case the smaller age groups are the ones that vary most significantly from this. Times for Kona qualifiers are often closer to the averages, but further back in the top twenty the gap tends to open up. This was certainly a slower year for qualification in the largest age groups.
You can access a spreadsheet of the full results from Ironman Lake Placid 2019 on my Google Drive.
