This week’s race analysis is for Ironman Tallinn a newcomer in its second year on the Ironman calendar. It’s a smaller race with a field under 1,000 athletes, but comes with the standard 40 age group Kona slots. As a new race there’s only a single previous year of results to compare.
Comparing the two years of racing, this year’s event came in a little slower. This is mainly the product of a slower bike section – about 15 minutes slower at the median. That difference carries through to the overall split. Swim and run distributions don’t trend far from the previous year.
This year’s race had a low level of DNFs. A drop on the previous year and low by Ironman standards. Have a look at my article on DNF rates for more information on how this compares.
Distributions tend to mirror the trends of the distributions. Only the bike shows any consistency with slower median splits. There’s more variance for swim and run, particularly where age divisions are smaller.
There was a very wide ranging field at this race, with slots distributed broadly.
There’s not a huge history of results to track finishing positions over. For the most part age group times are slower for specific positions. This isn’t completely consistent and some age group front runners were faster this year.
Based on the start numbers I’ve calculated the expected Kona slot allocation and from that the automatic qualification times. Final numbers may have varied and roll down is not factored in. You can compare this with other races on my Kona qualification page.
Finally comparing the top twenty in each age group we again see a broad pattern of slower times. The exceptions are there with a number of age groups where the front runners were faster. This tends to be in the larger age groups as before. So overall a slightly slower race, but still quite competitive for the Kona slots on offer.
You can access a spreadsheet of the full results from Ironman Tallinn 2019 on my Google Drive.
