ChrisM wrote:
Just replying here as it's the last post, but this website has a good historical perspective. In my AG (M 5054), median swim was about 22:00 faster than last year, bike 19:00 faster on the bike and 12 faster on the run. http://www.coachcox.co.uk/Agreed, it was certainly a faster day than last year. This is my AG too. This year's race was much more top heavy in this AG and I knew that going into the race looking at the start list. Take a look at Coach Cox's chart of the Top 20 times, this year that AG was very tight after the top 5, quite the flat slope in the chart.
I was about 10 minutes faster on the swim than expected, based on people I know this swim is typically about 5 minutes faster than a wetsuit lake swim, this year was an extra 10 minutes due to the following sea from the atypical wind direction (that holds up based on a few that did both years). The bike was for me about 5 or 6 minutes faster than the middle of the range that I expected and my run was similar to previous IM runs.
2nd place (last year's winner) was 7.5 minutes faster than last year, 9 minutes on the swim, bike was almost identical and run was a couple of minutes slower.
I wonder if other AGs got deeper too, this is the only one I looked at before the race and I knew it would be tougher to place high going into the race regardless of conditions.