Triathlon Rating

Usually this blog is about my own training and races … this entry is a little bit different but still very much focused on trathlon. I’d be happy to receive feedback on my thoughts, please leave a comment!

Macca’s IMTalk Interview

I’m a few weeks back in listening to my podcasts, so it wasn’t until Friday that I listened to IMTalk’s podcast interview with IM Hawaii winner Chris McCormack. A great, long interview – if you haven’t listened to it yet, you can find it here.

One of the things Macca mentioned started me thinking. I don’t have the exact words, but his point was that US races were easy to win but all the press was focusing on. Races in Europe (even the high profile ones) were much harder and also had a much bigger depth than the US races. One of his examples was Marino Vanhoenacker’s 7:52 in Austria – all this got in the US was a “Austria is a fast course” but not much more, so he wasn’t really on most people’s list for delivering a good performance in Hawaii. My idea at this point: There should be a way to rank the relative performances of athletes in different races.

Rating in Chess

When I was younger, I was quite a serious chess player. Chess has a great scoring system to compare the strengths of the different players, see this wikipedia article on the Elo Rating System (named after Prof. Arpard Elo, who developed the mathematical foundation). The score in chess in an artificial number, but it still was quite meaningful in comparing different players.

Known Scoring Systems in Triathlon

In triathlon, the only scoring systems I know are points based. In each race, there is a certain numbers of points to win, usually based on placing. Races are usually in a tiered system, i.e. better tiers dish out more points.

The “official” systems I’m aware of is the Pro qualifying points race for IM Hawaii by WTC and the points system for determining the ITU olympic distance world champion. I’ve also found the site triathlonranking.com that does a scoring of long distance racers. I’m not aware of any official status of this site, it seems to be a portfolio site by Wim De Doncker, a relatively well known Belgian triathlete who’s now also working as a freelance web designer. It’s also not completely up to date.

Problems with Points based systems

A points based system is pretty easy to set up, but I see a number of drawbacks:

• Frequent racers have an advantage over athletes that start less often.
  A good example is Craig Alexander – his only IM race is Hawaii which does not give him a lot of chances to earn points.
• It is very hard for a point based system to "fairly” reflect the strength of the field.
  The points you get depend a lot on who also shows up on race day.
• A points system does not offer a way to compare different courses.
  An example for such a system would be golf’s course rating. Almost all golf courses have a “par” score of 72. A course rating of 71 shows that this course is two shots easier than a course with a rating of 73 (for more, see another wikipedia article).
  
• A point system is not predictive.
  Just because you have x points, it does not mean you should be able to race in y time.
  

Ideas for a Triathlon Rating System

Compared to chess, triathlon has a natural way of scoring: your finishing time! Therefore, a better ranking system would have to incorporate these main ideas:

• an athlete’s rating should be his finishing time – this would naturally lead to different ratings based on race distance (Olympic, Half IM, IM-distance) – also makes a rating automatically predictive
• courses should be rated as well – for example by comparing finishing times for the same athlete on different courses you could say that course x is by 15 minutes harder than course y
• comparing expected and actual results by the athlete’s in a specific race would also allow you to determine if it was a hard year (e.g. in Hawaii a year with heat and strong winds) or an easier one and therefore allow you to compare different year’s results on the same course

Obviously, there are quite some tricky issues to resolve before this can be workable, but I think that the result can be quite interesting. I know that there is some previous work by Neil Hammond, but his main focus was on picking the race that would give you the best chance for qualification (ending in 2007 it’s also not quite up to date).

I think this is something interesting to look into. Does anyone know of anything similar to this? Any other comments or ideas? Also, if anyone knows of a database with decent quality race results, please give me a shout! Thanks.

Last under two hours .. or first over?

My winter race in Ratzeburg went really well. Depending on how you look at it, I just achieved my goal or missed it by just so much. But let’s start at the start …

.. or the days before the race. I didn’t do much training in the week before the race. I was a bit worried that I’d be too rested, so I made sure to get in a little run on Saturday. I got all the little aches and niggles that are typical for a taper – a little cramping while swimming on Thursday, some weird aches in my knee, but nothing out of order. My wife and I took some time looking around for a new kitchen, so I didn’t have too much of a chance to chill out on Saturday.

It had gotten really cold in the days, and there was a bit of snow on the ground. As there was not enough time for the ground to really freeze solid, there was a good chance for good racing conditions. In fact, the sun came out right before the 11am start, there was hardly any wind – perfect conditions for a winter race.

I took my time to warm up and had to hurry a bit to make it to start in time. Towards the start line it was getting quite crowded, so I was a bit back and started my watch when I crossed the line. This difference would prove to be important later. As I wanted to run a fast race, I moved forward quickly and tried to get a decent position in the first wider section before the course enters the forest. There were still some slower people to overtake, but all in all I had open enough space to run the pace I wanted.

I wanted to run around a 4:35 pace, and managed to hit that pretty well even in the hillier sections in the first 5k. However, I was running pretty hard, and my HR was a bit higher than what I thought would be possible for a 26k race. But I wanted to give it a try in order to have a shot at running under 2 hours. Once the first hills were over, I managed to run an even pace right where I wanted to run at. I even managed to get a few calories down, and it seemed to have a good effect on me. I was really worried that I would not be able to hold that pace until the end, but wanted to hold on as long as possible. Looking back, this is pretty much how you want to run a half marathon – run just another 1k at goal pace until you reach the finish line.

My split at 13k was just a bit over 59 minutes, so if I managed to hold my pace 2 hours should be possible. But that was a big “if”. Around the 18k mark, I was running into problems. Some more calories helped for a bit, but the effect wore off pretty soon and I was moving backwards in the field. I had made some good time and hoped that I had a big enough buffer for the final hills. I fell a bit apart when I hit the hills and walked on the steeper sections to preserve my last energy.

It was going to be really close. I knew the last k would be downhill and probably a good place to make up some more time, but I was running on fumes. Lots of grunting on the downhills (legs hurting!) and going as fast as possible – by my watch I would just make it under two hours. When I entered the finish chute and saw the official race clock, I knew I was right on the edge. The last seconds ticked down, and I still wasn’t home. When I finally made it, the official clock was at 2:00:03, but my own watch (remember I started it a bit later when crossing the start line?) said it was 1:59:55.

So, depending on how you want to see things, I was either the last one under 2 hours – or the first one over it. Regardless, this is a very big PR for the course – around 10 minutes faster than my previous best. True, I put a much bigger focus on this race than in previous years when I was just getting back into training after my fall break in October. But the time was still much better than what I thought I might be able to do and I’m really pumped about it. I thought that running really fast requires more than I was ready to give at this point (weight, volume, focus etc.). Now that Ratzeburg has gone well, I’m starting to think that I may have a fast marathon in me in 2011. Time to get my plan together …