I'm a data junkie - interesting none the less (Page 2)

I'd tend to disagree here.  I would think we put in a tremendous amount of time/emphasis on swim training, but I also think that the impact/improvement of swim vs bike/run is less significant. 

For example.  A ave/poor swimmer swimming 2:20/100 may spend significant time working on their swim only to reach 1:45/100 (40+ second improvement)  This improvement in a 750 yrd swim is less significant than a ave/poor cyclist @ 16.5 mph improving to 20 mph on a 15 mile bike ride.  (Feel that good swimmer is 1:20/100 and good cyclist 22 mph is just an opinion.)

Improvement in the swim as Daremo stated will keep you in the race, but will not win it for you.

This is the biggest part.  As you can see in many races the swim dictates very little on your overall placement.

Thanks for the info.  This is interesting to me, although I am struggling to read the charts (so embarrassed!).  Anyway, I get the drift.

I experienced this myself at an early season sprint this year.  I STRUGGLED with the swim (i.e old fashioned panic attack, swam head out of water the whole way), yet it was only 400 yards or so and therefore only ended up about 1-2 minutes behind the main group.  Fortunately I am a better than MOP cyclist and had a good run that day and ended up placing better than usual. And more importantly better than my competitive friends who usually beat me due to the swim   I realized that as a slow swimmer, shorter races would always be better for me as the ratio of bike and swim to run was much greater.

Although I will say that even at an Oly distance, my poor swim very much negatively effects me.  I can come out of the water 15 minutes after the leaders.  Big difference and too much to make up for me, even with the bike of my life...  This is all fine with me because I don't care enough to do the swim training required to improve much more.  Just thought I would share the anecdote... and I realize now that when you get outside of the fast group it seems that the swim can have a bigger impact.

Actually, BikerGrrl - you'd do much better in a full IM where the swim is a very small percentage of  the overall race time. In sprints/olys, the swim is a significant portion of the race.

I also don't quite think it's valid to look at pro swim times being clustered and concluding that it's not a good place to devote time training since differences will be small. Pros often choose to not be the 1st out of the water, as they can draft the pack as well as reduce energy sighting by just following the folks immediately in front of them. I suspect the swim differential would be much more significant if the swim was last, allowing folks to go all out on the swim portion.

moondawg14 - 2009-10-21 2:35 PM

KirkD - 2009-10-20 11:31 AM

gsmacleod - 2009-10-21 6:54 AM Here you go Jorge; from Beijing, male and female athletes. 

Shane

Wow! From this the run was decisive while swim and bike were effectively irrelevant. That seems odd.

Perhaps the run was only decisive due to its position as the last discipline?

Not so odd when you consider this data is referring to a draft-legal race.

Very interesting Kirk!

Another thing that would be interesting, from a duathlete's point of view at least, would be to see if we observe the same phenomenon with the first run of duathlons than with the swim of a tri. I have the impression that the results would tell me to improve my run... Lol