Ironman Florida 2019: Age Group Results and Kona Qualification
Ironman Florida is a long standing and large US race that offers the standard 40 age group Kona slot allocation. The course is flat and with that fast. This year’s race was no exception with times closely in line with those of previous years.
The swim was cancelled in 2014, so that year’s results have been excluded from analysis.
There is a slightly wider spread to this year’s distributions when compared with results from the previous decade. In both bike and run the median time is slightly slower while the fifth percentile time is slightly faster. This carries through into the overall results: mid-pack is slower, but front-of-pack trends faster.
DNF rates for this year fall in range of the previous 5 years. We should note that the 2018 race was moved (hence lower numbers) and suffered in heavy rains. DNF rates at Florida are typical for Ironman races as a whole.
Comparing the age group medians and we see a pattern similar to the distributions. The bike is clearly slower, but run medians more closely match and vary over the age groups.
Florida is one of the more diverse US races drawing a larger field of international competitors. It also appears to spread the Kona slots widely among them.
Times in Florida have been quite variable over the years, largely a reflection of the impact of conditions on this race. this year is comparable with 2017, while 2018 was notably slower.
Based on the start list I’ve calculated the Koan slot allocation and from that the automatic qualifying times in each age group. I don’t factor roll down into this as it’s unpredictable, but at the very least the M80-84 slot would have rolled one more place. You can compare this with other races on my Kona qualification page.
Finally each age group’s top twenty times. As noted earlier, the front-of-pack times appear to distribute faster. Looking at the top twenty confirms this with the majority of age groups having times ahead of the average. It’s not universal, some are closer to average, but equally we see some pushing towards fastest time in the last decade.
So, as we’ve seen before, there’s a division between front-of-pack and those further back. For the fastest athletes this year was fast for the course. For the overall field the picture is slightly slower though.
You can access a spreadsheet of the full results from Ironman Florida 2019 on my Google Drive.