Margins

Still churning through my upgraded database.  This mornings analysis looks at margins--both victory and defeat.  I sorted for the top 10 victory margins (and smallest 10), in terms of absolute time and relative percentage and my top 10 worse defeats--again both absolute and %.  Here are the victories first:

Not surprisingly, there is a fair amount of overlap between the absolute and % lists.  

Take-aways: I've enjoyed 6 races were my margin of victory was 10+ minutes.  All ten of my smallest victory margins are well under 1 minute.  I've won a lot of close AG races through the years.  My first victory at Lake Lenape in 2003 remains on this latter list.

My average margin of victory is of-course inflated vs. the mean due to some of the bigger blow-outs.

In the race I did this past Sunday, the tune-Up Tri, I posted a 8.3% victory margin or my 8th largest % margin of victory...this will get included when I update the database.

Here is what my defeat margins look like:

Take-aways:

I lose by a lot more than I win by.  This is not surprising as my wins are all compared against the 2nd place guy, while my loses are compared against the first place guy, no matter what place I finish--even 100th.

My big defeats are all concentrated in IM or IM70.3 WC races.  Four of my biggest defeat margins are the four WTC world championships I've competed in--the best in the world are a lot better than me!

6 times if I had been 1% faster I would have won a race I lost.  10 times I need to be 1 min or less faster to claim a victory.

I've won more of the close ones than I've lost.  I don't view this as a reflection of my character nor competitiveness but rather a reflection of the fact that victories (for me) will tend to be smaller than defeats.

There you go.  A whole bunch of pretty trivial data.