Race Place

As you know, I'm in the midst of data mining my recently updated Triathlon Race Database.  My last post attempted to analyze how I've raced relative to other competitors over time through my historical USAT ratings and my relative %tile overall and across each of the three disciplines.

Another way, and perhaps most direct way to do this is to look at what place I finished in the races vs. the overall field as well as against my Age Group.  Here is a summary by year for my Age Group finish as well as how I placed in each of the three individual sports  (in my Age Group).  I track the number and % of times I've finished 1st, 2nd or 3rd:

Observations:

-I have 50 1st, 36 2nd, and 11 3rd place finishes across my 156 triathlons.  I have won my Age Group 32% of the time and finished in the top 3 62% of time.
-My best % of wins was in 2013 (64%) followed by 2009 (57%)
-In 2009 I finished on the podium in all 14 races.

These %s are, of course, heavily influenced by the mix of races I enter.  In 2009 for example, I raced all Local races and that is why (in part) I have such strong relative performance in that year (and in 2013).  This can be seen in the same analysis but by the length of the race:

Here you can see that the longer the race is the lower % I finish 1st or in the top 3.  This is not to say that I'm just not good at longer races (in fact in the prior analyses, we saw that 4 of my best 10 races rating wise were Half IM including my two best races of all time: White Lake and SkipJack).  It's just that the longer races tend to have much larger fields of higher quality competitors.  It's one thing to finish in the top 3 at the Hammonton, NJ Sprint Triathlon with 180 competitors and 12 in my Age Group and an entirely different task against over 100 in my Age Group at the IM World Championships!

The next 4 charts show the above data graphically:

-I've been able to finish in the top 3 50+% of my races each year since 2003

-After better placing from year to year  throughout my earlier career, that trend seems to be on the decline  in recent years

-I became increasingly competitive on the swim, especially between 2007 and 2012, but my relative competitiveness on the swim seems to have declined since 2012.

-Not surprisingly, the bike is my strong suit in this metric, where I've been above 60% top 3 for most of my career.

-This metric also seems to indicate I'm becoming a bit less competitive over time

-I became increasingly competitive up through 2009 and was strongest on the run in the 2007-09 timeframe.

-While my competitiveness on the run has generally been on the decline the last 10 years, I did enjoy a bit of a blip up in 2013--at least as measured by top 3 Age Group finishes on the run.

A slightly different metric I track is called "Old Man?".  This is simply whether or not no one older than me was faster than me.  If no one was, then I'm the Old Man.  It's similar in a sense to the somewhat arbitrary 5-year Age Group designations.  Here is how that has trended through the years:

-I've been the Old Man in 56 of my races, which is slightly more than my 50 Age Group victories.

-This metric is clearly trending up over time.  Perhaps because there are fewer people who are older than I in races as I get older!  In fact, in a few races recently I've been the oldest competitor.

Lastly, I examined whether or not the year in any given Age Group was correlated with my Age Group place.  In other words, have I done better the first year in an Age Group (for example when I'm 50 in the 50-54 YO Age Group) vs. later years (for example the 5th year of the 50-54 YO Age Group when I'm 54):

Surprisingly, these lines don't slope downward to the right as one would expect.  I seem to be most competitive when I'm in the 2nd or 3rd year of an Age Group.

This is not to say, that one's relative performance is not related to age--trust me, it is!  But in my case, there are other factors that outweigh this factor in determining how often I win or are in the top 3.  For example, in 2007, when I turned 50 and was in my first year of the 50-54 Age Group, I raced a lot of high quality races while in 2009 (52 and in my 3rd year of the 50-54 YO Age Group) I raced much smaller local races.

In any event, at 63 I'm now in my 4th year of the 60-64 YO Age Group and the above chart seems to indicate my prospects for winning are less than my historical average of 32%!

LOL!  Onward and upward, baby!