Last Year's Results

Its always a good idea to know what you're up against so Saturday afternoon while I awaited the Washing Machine to either finally break or start working again, I thought I'd check out the actual results for last years IRONMAN Wales. (You can find the details here).

(I was going to work out some very tenuous percentages for this article to see what percentage of people do Ironman and how many complete. And I may do that later but as I start to do so I realised how incredibly fortunate I am to be even contemplating doing Ironman from a physical, financial and situational positions.)

Last year 2085 people entered Ironman Wales. So far I know 1 person who has signed up for an ironman distance race officially, and going by my Facebook page I know about 350 people. So let's say about 0.3% of people sign up.

So by signing up you are already 3 in a 1000. However looking at these results not everyone started and certainly not everyone finished.  Of the 2085 entrants, 445 either didn't start or did not finish. Only 1640/2086 finished, that's around 79%. So people who enter and finish Ironmans are 47 in every 20,000, that's 0.235%. So we're up against the odds already. However both me and Dan are stubborn, so let's assume our sheer bloody mindedness and terror will allow us to be on the 0.235%, how are our precdicted times going to hold up.



The winning time was

0:51:54

05:03:29

03:04:44

09:07:28

That's under 52 minutes to swim 2.4 miles, 112 Miles on Bike in just over 5 hours, and a Marathon in just over 3 hours.
Average speed of the winner, Matt Trautman. Congratulations Matt.

2.8mph Swim,22.4mph bike and 8.8mph run.

Let's compare that to me and Dan's predictions:

Rhys: 1.6 mph Swim 14.94mph bike  4.37 mph run
Dan:   1.6 mph Swim 18.67 mph bike 4.03mph

So with our predictions, we aint going to win. Quelle Suprise. But where will we come if we do as well as we hope. (I've left the DNF/DNS in for this, without the figures will skew higher, as I can't work out how to remove them easily)

The Median Swim speed is 1.75mph
The Median Bike speed is 16.61mph
The Media Run speed is 5.86mph
Median Total Time 14 hr 5min 55 secs.

Going by these figures, neither of us will be in the top 50% of the pack but remember just finishing puts us in the top 0.235%. Even just signing up will put us in the top 0.3%.

If you've any comments or have better maths to apply to this, please do so in the comment box below.