IM and the Median

I told my friend John in NY about my ironman plan. John is a runner and we were also talking about speed work, and I mentioned that I'm really not planning on any at all. This is largely because IM is an endurance event, and I'm not kidding myself - I'm not going to be fast enough for speedwork to matter.

As an example, at Ironman Wisconsin, a 4:00:00 marathon was in the 7th percentile - turning in a 4 hour marathon meant you were faster (on the run) than 93% of the other participants. Whereas, at a standalone marathon, 4 hours isn't anything special. Hey, I would be very proud of that time, but overall, as far as competitive running, it isn't really that fast. We see that ironman is really about slowing down the least. And of course, the pros and top age groupers are just from another planet altogether!

So I got to wondering what the median times were at IMCdA last year. There were 1789 participants, so I looked to see how #895 did, ranked by times. The results:

• swim - 1:15:34
  
• bike - 6:16:21
  
• run - 5:06:37
  
• overall - 12:59:06
  

I didn't bother to dig up transition times and find the median there. ;)

At IMCdA, the 235th fastest marathon was 4:00:02, putting it into the 13th percentile.

I love looking at various stats - in some ways it reminds me that thousands of normal people train for and finish an ironman.