Ironman Maryland 2019: Age Group Results and Kona Qualification
The first race from a busy weekend is Ironman Maryland. A mid-sized US race with the standard 40 Kona slots on offer for the 2020 Ironman World Championship. This year’s race looks to have been on the slower side. Variations in the course have impacted results before – 2015 had a shorter swim and 2016 had no swim at all. For that reason 2016 has been excluded from the analysis.
When comparing the distribution of times between 2019 and 2014-2018 (excluding 2016) it’s important to note that the swim distribution for the later is skewed by the short 2015 times. Overall this year’s race trended slower than the previous results. This is predominantly due to a slower run, with median times being 20 minutes behind the amalgamated results. The bike distribution is inline with the historic data and as noted swim is hard to compare due to the 2015 race.
The DNF rate for this year’s race is much higher than usual with a high number of drop outs during the run. Prior to that DNF levels were normal for the course, but the run shift pushes Maryland up into the higher range of DNF.
The age group medians reflect what we saw in the distributions: comparable bike, but a much slower run.
The majority of the field comes from North America, but the Kona slots are spread a little bit more widely than that.
Tracking times for specific age group positions reflects two aspects of this race: the variation in the course and also the variation in the size of the field. This year seems fairly consistent for front of pack positions, but the impact is more variable further back. Some of that is field size, 100th place in an age group is much further back when the race only had 1,000 competitors in 2017.
Based on the start list I’ve calculated the initial Kona slot allocation and from that automatic qualifying times. It is worth noting that two age groups had no finishers so their slots would roll into other age groups. I don’t factor roll down as it’s an unpredictable element of qualification. You can compare this with other races on my Kona qualification page.
Finally, the top twenty in each age group varies around the average. For the most part results do trend close to course averages at the front of the race, but a few age groups come in faster or slower than usual. For the most part qualification times were close to average, but there are a few exceptions.
You can access a spreadsheet of the full results from Ironman Maryland 2019 on my Google Drive.
