pretty sure it was 5mph

let me double check

correction: 4.3mph

his bike was illegal by today's standards? depends if we are talking UCI or TRI, and if Gerard is to be believed, the latest superbikes are as fast as his bike despite being legal.

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Kat Hunter reports on the San Dimas Stage Race from inside the GC winning team
Aeroweenie.com -Compendium of Aero Data and Knowledge
Freelance sports & outdoors writer Kathryn Hunter

as of 2009 (no olys last summer due to them all being shortened and then season cut in half)

28yo, 5'10, 153lbs
40k tt: 1:02:25 (hilly course, in tri, no aero gear apart from clip ons, conti gatorskins + butyl tubes, ksyriums)
10k run 35:05 (hills, in tri)

I've run faster than that though same summer, so I think I'd be good for a minute faster. In my teens I was able to hit mid 33 once, but was slow as shit on the bike.

EDIT: I also weighed 145lbs at race weight then, so that probably helped

with full on aero weenie gear your would smash right through the hour barrier.

hell replacing the gatorskins alone might do it!

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Kat Hunter reports on the San Dimas Stage Race from inside the GC winning team
Aeroweenie.com -Compendium of Aero Data and Knowledge
Freelance sports & outdoors writer Kathryn Hunter

Interesting to see the personal comparisons, here's mine, a bit bike heavy. 1 year of running, 4 year of cycle training
6'0 178lbs - 26yo

52:00 - 40k TT - full aero

36:45 open 10k PR
17:15 open 5k PR

Hey Greyskinner, what is your half-IM time if you dont mind me asking? My 10km is similiar to yours, but my biking is atrocious. LOL

I bet the tire change alone would have done it. For contrast when I bought an alu p3 last year + trained properly (ie once a week interval workout) + set it up properly (stinger 90s, wheelcover, low low low position for 51cm frame, bell vortex, good tires) I was very fast.... but I didn't do a 40k tt. The best I can say is for a hilly 8 miles I was able to average 28mph.

57:21 40K, 3rd hand moderately aero frame (Yaqui Carbo) with good cheap-ass aero bits (old used Jet 60 front, wheel cover over PT rear, aero helmet, excellent tires/tubes, skinsuit, booties).

42:00? (maybe slower) 10K.

5-9, 145 lbs., 43 yo.

Never done half iron, been wanting to try one later this year.
Done several sprints, where the times stack up to around 24mph/18:30

In super cycling shape right now, not running so it will be interesting to see the tradeoff.

I agree with your assessment. At 17 and 145 lbs, a sub 35 10k was relatively easy. PR was 33:52. Now at 41 and 175 lbs (not to mention 25 years of accumulated injuries), I haven't run under 42 for 10k. With a good year of a cycling focus and some aero tweaks to my bike I'm fairly certain I could get close to 1 hr for 40k. I'm a stronger cyclist now than during my fast running days.

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Formerly DrD

I think you would see better correlation between run times and bike times from people if you made the bike comparison with an 8% gradient. I'm not sure what distances you would compare though.

You wouldn't see 55min 40ks and 42min 10ks!!

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I at least am not interested in the whole W/kg issue, more the flat 40k vs flat 10k. My suspicion (which is somewhat borne out by people's answers) is that the faster runners are slower on the bike and vice versa.

Perhaps I just don't train enough and don't train properly, but a 56 minute 40k tt just seems brutally fast.

Doubt that, some (many) of the very strongest cyclists I know were former runners.

I'm nearly equal in all 3 sports. Coming from a background in swimming (IM/Fly/Br) and a little Middle school track/HS XC, I picked up cycling, and over probably 5 years went from around 20mph avg at sprint tri's to 24-25, depending on the course. At the beginning of that 5 years I was still a fledgling triathlete, and I was running right around 21' 5k off the bike. Now I'm consistently in the 24mph range on the bike, regardless of hilliness, and hopefully in the 35's-36's off the bike. Earlier this year I threw down something like a 25.25-25.50 mph avg over a hilly 10 miler with a shit ton of those huge speed bumps, and my 5k off the bike was a 17:30. Over time my swim, bike and run ranks within a race have been pretty much equal, depending on my particular race strategy.

Funny thing is, I don't know if I buy into this whole "converting times off the bike to an open 5k/10k" business. The better shape you're in, the closer you get to your own personal limit within each sport in the triathlon. As a matter of fact, in all of HS XC and several years of goofing off at 5k's afterward I never came within 30s of that 17:30--my fastest 5k was after a really short swim, and a 10mi bike @ 25+mph. As further proof, Jarrod Shoemaker's 5k PR at the Carlsbad 5000 was a 14:12 last year. He ran a "13:52" (if I recall correctly...it was certainly in the 13's but i might be off a few seconds) at the Clermont Challenge earlier this year. Different courses, but still, I don't see much conversion if any needed.

In my experience, coming out of the water in 10:30 for 750m, or 21:00 for 1500m is roughly equivalent to 59:30-1:01 bike (course dependent) and probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 17:00-18:00 5k or 35:30-37:30 10k (course dependent).

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This.

Although there is a lot of variation there.

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"TRIATHLON ISN'T ACTUALLY THAT HARD OF A SPORT" -ALISTAIR

Interesting point, and what I'd expand on is that your potential to run your fastest 10k on that day is a function primarily your swim and bike fitness, and how hard you go in those. The fitter you are on the bike and swim, the faster you'll run. But in a nondrafting race, I still think we're talking a 45-60 seconds in a 5k and 2 minutes in a 10k. (There should be less of a drop off for the 5k because you've only got ~35 minutes of work coming before in a sprint, as opposed to ~80 in an olympic) When the fastest runners in tri do a nondraft race, you rarely see them run under 31 flat on an accurate course (Vanort and Jefferson come to mind). They're both sub 29 min 10k runners. Running off the bike is more about strength than speed. Jarrod ran 14:12 and 14:20 in two road 5ks the last month, but think about how much less track work he's doing b/c he has to balance two other sports in his training. So you're right, he can probably come pretty damn close to that in a draftlegal race (Clermont was wicked short, so it's worthless as a comparison), but probably less so in a nondrafting, and probably nowhere near his absolute potential - which is probably 13:30 or faster (he ran right with Ben St Lawrence who ran 13:10 on the track earlier this year in both road 5ks).

If you look at the elites/fast amateurs you generally see guys running the nondraft triathlon 10k closer to their half marathon pace than open 10k pace -ie Vanort, Jefferson, Whitfield are 65-67 min half guys, so a 31 makes sense. This makes a lot of sense to me, as that 10k is coming after ~80 minutes of hard work.

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If you took a group of triathletes, and the guys who had the fastest 10K times, will also be in on the podium for a 8% uphill 1 hour climb. Yes, the 42 min 10K guys who do 55 min 40 k TT's would be off the back. What is interesting is that when we climb Whiteface, the finishing order is almost identical to the finishing order we'd get if I threw the same group of triathletes into a 10K run race. Somehow triyoda ends up toying around with all of us......

There used to be a cool Olympic Tri in France from Thonon les Bains on Lake Geneva (Lac Leman) to the Morzine/Avouriaz ski resort....Olympic tri with something like 1500m of vertical on the bike and another 500m + on the run at altitude. Simon Lessing won that race a few times if I recall correctly. We need more races like that. We'd have a field day with the IMFlorida studs :-)

That's cuz watts/kg is a good proxy for running m/s.

In triathlon that seems to be true, but many very good cyclists were former runners. They do, afterall, have the same exact build most of the time.

As for triathlon, lets look at Nautica South Beach a few weeks ago (I'm on a realllllly boring conference call):

Athlete Bike Run Bike/Run
Cam Dye 53:09 34:39 - 1.53
Potts 54:51 33:15 - 1.65
Ospaly 56:36 31:17 - 1.81
Weiss 52:10 32:16 - 1.62
Yoder 54:14 35:14 - 1.54
VanOrt 56:40 31:04 - 1.82
Polikarpenko 56:34 33:10 - 1.71
Thompson 55:16 33:46 - 1.64
Krylov 56:17 33:45 - 1.67
Bockel 55:43 34:48 - 1.60
Fleischmann 56:52 35:22 - 1.61
Limkemann 56:20 35:44 - 1.58
Jefferson 58:49 31:32 - 1.87
Kenny 56:39 36:21 - 1.56
Rhodes 56:12 38:14 - 1.47
Collins 60:29 35:14 - 1.72

The mean 'factor' is 1.65 with a standard deviation of .11

Interestingly, the three fastest runners had larger factors (1.82, 1.81, 1.87).

The three fastest cyclists had smaller factors (1.62, 1.53, 1.54).

Ultimately there's only one number that matters at the end: Place. After that, the only number that possibly matters is overall time. That said, I still think this is pretty interesting. You might conclude that 1.65 is your 'optimal' drop off for pacing. Weiss had by far the fastest bike/run combo and was 1.62 (clearly he needs to swim more). But ordering by combined bike/run time doesn't really tell us that (though the best fit line is slightly downward sloping). Obviously racing, tactics, etc play a big role in all of this, but I still think looking at a nondrafting race where the field spread out on the bike and came back together on the run was the best place to start.

1:24:26; 1.62
1:27:44; 1.82
1:27:48; 1.53
1:27:53; 1.81
1:28:6 1; 1.65
1:29:20; 1.64
1:29:28; 1.54
1:29:44; 1.71
1:30:20; 1.67
1:30:21; 1.87
1:30:31; 1.60
1:32:40; 1.58
1:32:14; 1.61
1:33:00; 1.56
1:34:26; 1.47
1:35:43; 1.72

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this tells me that when running I need to find a way to get aero and hope for a 50mph head wind

Yes and no.

I'll concede Clermont was short...several of the big dogs that raced that day estimated it was off by about .1, or a little more...basically the assertion was that Jarrod, Roualt, et al ran closer to a 14:30 true 5k. Still, how different is that from his open 5k? Not much (<10 seconds), sure, he could train for the run only like he did in college, and he would be fast, but that's beside the point because he would no longer be a triathlete. As a triathlete, his run is what it is. If he is running open 5k's in 14:12 and 14:20 in season, then that is his ultimate ability level at this point in time.

I think it's by coincidence that guys run slower in non-draft than they do in draft-legal. Draft legal triathlon is extremely difficult, even more so in some ways than non-draft. Granted, you are allowed to draft, which will save you energy to a certain extent, but the speeds are higher on the bike, and the amount of effort required on the swim just to get you to that point to begin with is herculean. This means that comparatively speaking the fatigue level pre-bike is higher in DL than NDL. On the bike it's a whole different ballgame too. It's like the difference between doing 55 min @ 85-90% MHR vs. 15x2:00 @ 95%MHR with 2:00 @ 80-85% in between. Plus, if you don't make the bunch out of the water, then your race is basically over.

You're right that very few break 31 off the bike in NDL, but I think it is also so course-dependent that it's hard to really control for who is faster off the bike in DL vs. NDL. The ITU allows variations in course distance up to 1 or 2% I believe (done for convenience so that a good loop will not be ruled out because it's a little short or long), so they're not always cranking out a full 10k which makes their times look all the more fast. Several courses on the WCS circuit last year came up under 9.6 or 9.7km on the run. I'll try to scrounge up the proof of this, but for now you'll have to take me at my word. This, in contrast to most local/national level races where the courses are not looped and certain things like turnaround points, etc. are not fixed so that there are no excuses for the course to not be exactly 10k.

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Gotta hate that Yoda character

Apparently I should be running sub 30. Gonna go work on that.

Obviously the guys who ran the course said it was only .1 short. Haha. The fact that we don't actually know the distance means we can't use it for comparison.

I'm not debating that nondraft is 'harder' than drafting. But the entire point of draft-legal is to use as little energy as possible on the swim and bike if you're a fast runner. If you're not in the top 10 runners, then you shoot for a break. I've done plenty of tris and even more bike races. If you make the pack, and want to sit in and conserve energy, then you can - provided you know how to ride in a group.

That said, race tactics aside in a nondraft, you're trying to spread your effort evenly over 2 hours, as opposed to saving it up and then blasting a run.

The overall speeds are rarely faster than the top nondraft splits (when's the last time you saw an itu pack ride 52-53 minutes?) At anyrate, if your assertion were true, you'd have guys like Don, Brownlee and Gomez regurlarly running sub 29 on legit 10k courses. Which never happens. Because - no big surprise - swimming and running for ~80 minutes first is tiring. I seriously don't know how you can argue otherwise. That said, as I pointed out before, the fitter you are the close you'll be to all out pace but it's physiologically impossible to equal it.

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I ran the course. I got it at 3.03 on my Forerunner 310xt, but I stopped my watch after the finish chute and started it probably 20m out of transition.
True that (but see below). I just don't think a 2 min adjustment over 10k is fair, or even 1 min over 5k.

My fastest open 5K: 17:57.
My fastest 5k off the bike: 17:31

Open 5k was last summer, off the bike was in March. I bet I'd be faster than 17:31 now in an open 5k, but I'm no 16:30 5k runner....

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Doesn't seem to go the other way either. My awesome 3.1 w/kg 1hr ride translates into running a 53 minute 10k.

With my 10k PR around 4.3m/s does that just mean I am nowhere near my cycling potential?