monty wrote:
And to get back on track on why medium/large guys do well at Kona and other ironmans, it seems pretty simple to me. Look at swimmers, they are large dudes. The distance guys are not as large as the 200 guys where Phelps looks like a small average dude on the final blocks, but they are good size. Now go to TT'ing on rolling courses, what size guys dominate that in cycling? Large dudes, and they would be even larger if they could only do long time trials and never race other events. So now you have 6 hours of an 8 hour race dominated by bigger guys.
Sure you have 115 lb Kenyans winning world class marathons, but if you throwing burning all the fuel that 6 hours of red line swimming cycling burn,
probably no place to even put all those calories into those little runners. So big guy equals big storage and running a marathon on tired legs is not nearly the same as running a sub 2;10 fresh. But I will give the run leg to the smaller folks, but just barley. Of course we have had many smaller guys run very well in Kona, but they start so far back because of their size that it cannot be overcome.
Like someone said Greg Welch was the only break through but it was an outlier race. 2nd place was a masters athlete Dave Scott and the rest of the top 10 was not your usual stacked field of contenders. He was also an outlier athlete at his size for ironmans, no one said it was 100% big guys..
That part in bold, I am pretty certain you are on to the main reason. We've seen some smaller guys actually get to T2 with the top guys (ex Guillaume Romain) but when they do, they don't run as fast as a small athlete should, or if they run fast, they are way off the back after the bike (remember Kropko always running 2:4x)?