Average Race Pace

For this post I return to look at how my swim, bike and run pace has changed over time.  In the three charts below, the average race pace is plotted over time for each of the three disciplines.  The average in these charts is "race weighted" versus distance or time weighted.  In other words a sprint race and an Ironman race have the same weighting even though the later is so much further.  In the prior post, I calculated pace on a distance/time weighted basis so, for example, a race the took 12 times as long had 12 times the impact vs. equal impact in the race weighted approach here:

You can see the nice improvement in my swim pace (minutes/mile) over time with my best performance occurring at 11 on the x-axis, this is 2012.  The last data point is the average for my last 4 years (post my injury driven off year in 2015).  Seeing this chart is generating a bit of desire on my part to invest more aggressively in the swim this year.

My bike seems to have peaked in 2004 (3 on the x axis) and has steadily declined since.

My run has generally been slowing down over time and in 2014 and then for 2016-2019 (points 13 and 14) that trend appears to be accelerating (unfortunately).

One of the problems with this analysis is while it is race weighted, it still is impacted by the mix of races from year to year.  If you do more longer races in one year versus another, all things else being equal, you would expect to see slower average pace.  The chart below shows that over time my average race has indeed been getting longer:

And this table shows how my pace generally slows down as the race gets longer:

By the way, over the 19 years and 156 races of my career my average pace overall is:

Swim: 29:47/mile or 1:42/100 yards

Bike: 22.5mph

Run: 8:31/mile

Anyways, given the above I just looked at my 108 Sprint distance races only and set the 8 races of 2001/2002 equal to 1.00.  I also inverted the swim and run metrics so that up (above 1) is always better:

In my view, this chart gives the clearest indication of how fast I have been over time.

-My swim improved by nearly 40% from 2001 to 2012 (point 11 above) but has since declined back to where it started in the last (2016-2019) period.  

-My bike improved about  5% by 2004 and generally stayed above the 2001/02 average until 2014 (point 13) and is about 6% slower for the most recent 2016-2019 period.  However, for just 2019 alone I was just 1% slower (0.99) than in 2001/02.

-My run after peaking at about 5% faster in 2007 (point 6 above) has been on a pretty steep decline  and is down about 17% for 2016-2019.  However, 2019 was down "just" 14% so maybe I'm having a slight bounce back as of late

-Overall, I'm about 9% slower for the 2016-2019 period than I was in 2001-2002.  I was above 1.0 up through 2013 with the decline coming from 2014  through today.

Getting old is not good for fans of fast racing!