Ironman Lake Placid 2025: Age Group Stats and Qualification Times
I’m going to take a late look at the age group results from last weekend’s Ironman Lake Placid. A long standing race with a course that’s a bit slower than the average. Ironman races are still using qualification based on start numbers with Lake Placid offered 65 slots to men and 35 to women.
Result Distributions
This year’s race trends a little faster than the amalgamated results from the previous 5 races. Swim splits look to be largely identical in pattern, but the run clearly trends much faster. The median run is around 30 minutes faster than the amalgamated data and the top 5% around 10 minutes faster. This shift in the run overshadows the very slight change in bike distributions, which is also a touch faster. Overall, thanks to a fast run, we have a year that trends faster than recent results.
DNF Rates
While the event appears to be faster, DNF rates aren’t too far form previous races. Lower than a number of recent years, but not outstanding.
Median Splits
Median splits follow the patterns of the distributions, so the stand out feature is the faster run times. Bike and swim times don’t vary enough to show major patterns.
Competitor Origins
The majority of athletes are unsurprisingly from the US, with Canada in second place. Qualification slots will mostly have been offered to them.
Performance Changes
Looking at the long race history of Lake Placid and times for specific race positions what’s most evident is how variable this race has been. Both year-on-year and between age groups at the race. This year is not universally faster across all age groups – we can find examples where it trends slower.
Qualification
Based on the start numbers for this race I’ve calculated the number of slots allocated to each age group and from that their final qualifying times. Roll down isn’t accounted for and with one age group having no finishers there will be at least one roll down slot.
You can explore qualification in detail and see how the new qualification system works on my Ironman Lake Placid Qualification page.
Age Group Top 20
The top 20 age group performances at this year’s race also reflect the variability of this course. Female age groups trend a bit faster than the average more often than not, male age groups lie closer to the averages for the most part. With a couple of exceptions there isn’t as large a deviation from averages as the run splits might imply. Going back to the distributions we did see a bigger change at the median than the top 5%.
Conclusion
As a whole Ironman Lake Placid 2025 was a faster year for the course. This isn’t played out consistently across all age groups and is more evident at the middle-of-pack than the front-of-pack. The fastest age groupers performed as might be expected, as we go further back in the field we see a bigger change.