The third and final Ironman of the weekend was Ironman Canada. This is a midsize race that comes with the standard 40 Kona slots for the fastest age groupers. Having moved from Penticton to Whistler in 2013, Ironman Canada is now scheduled to move back in 2020. Which means, while this analysis will allow us to compare this year’s race with others in Whistler, it won’t tell us much about next year’s qualification in Penticton. To complicate comparisons further, the bike course saw changes both this year and the last.
The split distributions from this years race line up quite well with the amalgamated data from the previous 6 years. After a slower 2018 (which is part of the amalgamated results) this year’s race looks to be closer to form for Whistler.
2018 really was an exception with its extreme DNF rate over 20%. This year returns us to a relatively low 8.3% for this event. You can compare this with other races and see how DNF rates look across Ironman here.
Age group medians tend to follow the trends set in the distributions. In this cases as the distributions were similar we see some variance across age groups. Some are faster and some slower giving no clear trend.
Ironman Canada is a strongly North American race and keeps most of the Kona slots there too.
Tracking age group times for specific positions over the last few years shows some variance with the 2018 results tending to be the slowest. This years race appears to sit somewhere in the middle of this spread, not the fastest or slowest edition fo the Whistler race.
Based on the start list I’ve calculated the Kona slot allocation for Ironman Canada and from that the automatic qualification times. Final numbers may vary and I’ve not accounted for any roll down. You can compare these times with other races on my Kona qualification page.
Finally the top twenty age group times are again on the average. There is some age group variation where we see faster or slower times, but this is about as close to the course averages as we see.
You can access a spreadsheet of the full results from Ironman Cana 2019 on my Google Drive.