- (gags in disgust) Trainiacs.
I am two and a half weeks into the three week
keto period of the low-carb, high-fat protocol.
That run sucked.
HRV was low this morning, resting heart rate
was high overnight,
readiness just feels like (gags in disgust).
But let's not be Debbie Downers
just because we had a bad run.
No, no, no, no, no.
Remember how I said that we're digging into all the data
of five years' worth of Ironman results?
We found out where the best swimmers, bikers,
and runners come from all around the world.
It shocked me.
A lot of things are shocking me.
Performance, shocking me.
Let me go cover these up, and then we'll talk.
(energetic music)
All right, Trainiacs.
We got a lot of stats to talk about
with the best athletes from around the world
in the swim, the bike, the run.
Where do they come from?
And where do the fastest athletes
from each country finish, approximately,
in their discipline in each race?
Before we get into this,
how we came up with this calculation
of where the best athletes come from is,
what we did is we used obstri.com,
which has access to five years, hundreds of thousands
of finisher data numbers and metrics for the swim,
the bike, the run, straight from Ironman
and Ironman 70.3 races.
We took all of those hundreds of thousands
of finish times, we figured out the percentage of athletes
that came from each country, and then,
we figured out the percentage of athletes
that are in the top 15% from each country.
So for example, if Canada represented 10%
of the global finisher times, but it had 15%
of the finisher times that were in the top 15%
of all races around, it did better than average,
because we would expect that if everyone just performed
as their average, Canada would have 10% of the athletes
in the top 15%.
So, it's kind of a rough approximation
of where best comes from, but it's closest we can do,
and when you start looking at like, big, broad
sets of data, it starts nullifying some of the issues
with different courses, different conditions,
things like that.
But I will address a little bit of the differences
that arise from that.
Swim.
So, the best performing countries, as far the swim goes.
Italy, Australia.
Australia, not surprising, because they're born swimming.
You talk to any pro triathlete that comes from Australia,
they live, eat, and breathe swimming.
Spain, Switzerland, Brazil, Deutschland, a.k.a. Germany,
and then we start getting into the countries
that perform just right around the average.
France, Argentina, Canada, Poland, Great Britain,
USA, Denmark, ZAF?
South Africa.
Let me fact check.
South Africa.
And then the countries that underperform
fairly significantly are Sweden, Chile, Mexico,
Colombia, Japan, Philippines.
Next thing we're gonna look at is the average finish times
of athletes with a DPI over 95.
Now, if you haven't gone to obstri.com
and checked out your DPI, you can look yourself up
on obstri.com.
And the DPI is basically, how you performed
relative to the field.
And it does this for the swim, the bike, the run.
So if you have a DPI of over 95,
that means that you are in like, the top 5%
of the overall finishers, and it accounts for
all the different variables of, is the swim
with the current?
Is it a fast swim?
How are the competitors around you?
It kind of nullifies a lot of the race to race differences.
So what do we see from these fastest athletes
and their average finish time in the swim?
Well, remember that Italy, Australia, Spain,
Switzerland, and Brazil were the fastest overall countries,
that performed over average.
Well, the fastest athletes from Spain
averaged around 28:24 in the swim.
Italy, 28:30.
Poland, 29:08.
Brazil, 29:24.
Sweden, which oddly, underperformed as a whole,
they have some fast athletes in there.
So, what this is showing is the tip of the spear
from that country.
Where do they perform?
And what we can see a little bit,
is that, let's say Australia here,
while they tend to perform over average well,
it's not like their fastest athletes
are being extremely fast, like Spain.
There's just a very large percentage that do above average.
And the slowest times even of the fastest athletes,
Philippines, Japan.
Let's move on to the bike.
The most overperforming countries on the bike,
Denmark, Brazil, Switzerland, Australia, Poland,
Sweden, Germany.
And then the average performing countries,
Argentina, Colombia, Canada, France, Spain, Italy.
The underperforming countries will be Chile,
United States, Great Britain, Mexico, Japan,
South Africa, Philippines.
The fastest times of the fast.
If you wanna start being the fast of the fast,
you gotta start going along the lines of Brazil,
doing 2:29:37 for a Half.
Sweden, doing 2:30:16 for a Half.
Poland, doing 2:30:22 for a Half.
You've gotta be around that 2:30 for a Half Ironman.
How about the run?
Best performing countries, Poland, France,
Switzerland, Spain, Germany, Denmark, Italy,
Australia, Brazil, Sweden, Argentina.
And there are three countries here
that kind of perform in line, Great Britain,
Chile, Canada.
And the underperformers, Colombia, USA, Japan,
South Africa, Mexico, Philippines.
And if you wanna be the fastest of the fast in the run,
you need to be going with the Spaniards,
doing somewhere around 1:31:09.
Poland, doing 1:31:49.
France, doing 1:32:51.
You gotta be kind of around that 1:30
for a Half Ironman goal.
All the way down to Japan and the Philippines,
at 1:51:40.
USA, doing 1:43:46.
So what can you take as an action on this?
Well, besides maybe moving to a country
when you are five, and just kind of getting indoctrinated
into the culture of swim, bike, run,
whatever it might be that is causing them to perform
over average, not a lot.
What you can do, however, is adjust your training
and race selection and your goals.
So, if you're looking at performing tip of the spear
kind of good in the swim,
you gotta be somewhere around that.
For a Half Ironman, you gotta be somewhere around
that 30 minute mark.
If you're talking about the bike,
to be that tip of the spear good,
you gotta be somewhere around the 2:30 mark.
To be tip of the spear kind of good in the run,
you've gotta be somewhere around that 1:34, 1:35 run,
resulting in an overall finish time of around 4:35
to be in that top 5%.
And that's where you start getting into the position
where you could potentially qualify for
Half Ironman Worlds.
Top 1% will basically guarantee you there time after time.
But this at least gets you in the running
for a roll down spot, because I believe
that a lot of people can train themselves
to get into that top 5%, but to be in that top 1%,
you've gotta have a lot of natural talent,
or a history of being a really good swimmer,
a really good biker, a really good runner.
Still doable, just a little bit harder.
Now, the next thing that you can do is,
if you are on that bubble of like, not being in the top 1%,
is you can look at where the competition
is going to be the stiffest, to help select
some of your races.
So we see, consistently, that Japan, the Philippines,
tend to be on the slower side and underperform on average.
Now, I think that this might have
a fair bit to do with their climate being a little bit hot,
so it just brings overall times down,
but if you go back and look at the swim times,
Japan and the Philippines were all in the same water,
and it tends not to be that much hotter,
and they are significantly slower.
So, I think that's just the nature of it
being so, so new in their countries that,
if you're willing to travel, you can go
and potentially cherry-pick a spot to Worlds.
So it's all very interesting,
and all this data we're starting to sift through
and trying to like, moneyball how to be a good triathlete,
what do you focus on, the swim, the bike, the run,
where do you race, where do you need to train,
if you're looking at really getting like,
absolutely as sharp as you possibly can.
All these things that we can start pulling out
from this massive amount of data that's at obstri.com.
Go check it out.
I got no affiliation with Christophe,
who programs obstri.com, besides him being a buddy.
And go in and check out where your DPI is.
How do you relate to people in the races
that you've raced in?
All right?
Later, Trainiacs.
That was a very firm all right.
That felt like a forceful all right.
All right?
Right.