I wondered about that - my buddy seemed slower than expected.

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Aaron Bales
Lansing Triathlon Team

Checking a few folks I know racing, times do look slow. Will be interesting to hear from folks after the race.

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Blog: http://262toboylstonstreet.blogspot.com/
https://twitter.com/NateThomasTri
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Water temp was too warm for wetsuit.

Might account for longer swim times

I would say you can add 10 percent to most age groupers for no wetsuit and you might be able to add a few min for altitude. One of my friends who is 30-34 was 1st out of the water in his age group in both Zurich and Boulder in 57 min. Both not wetsuit. I believe he swam 52 min in South Africa, wetsuit+salt water+ major waves and currents

First male swimmer out of water 49:23, not sure what others think, but that is fast! (slow old guy here)
Watched the swim exit on replay, and no one was even close to this guy.

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Cervelo P3 / Flo 60/90
RTA Nation

I swam in the reservoir a couple months ago and definitely think 10% increase in time is reasonable but when I say 10-20 min slower I'm accounting for that (at least I think!). It's wetsuit legal but water is warm so maybe that's the difference. Or maybe the times I'm seeing are from race start time not 'chip crossing the mat' time! Heck I don't know!

Is it a mass start? That sure as hell added 10min to my swim at AZ

CC

The times you see are actual chip times. I have a few friends who have done Kona and are doing Boulder. They are just a few min slower in Boulder than Kona. This makes sense as it accounts for the salt water vs fresh water. Both cases no wetsuit.

I have a friend racing today that swam 20 minutes slower than he did at IM Texas a couple months ago. Both were fresh-water, non-wetsuit swims.

Today was wetsuit legal. My KQ buddy was 20 min slower on this swim too. Amazing. But he bounced back with a 4:51 bike! Still has work to do.

According to the other thread, today was not wetsuit legal.

Well I watched the swim exit online and unless 9/10 people just wanted to finish it looked wetsuit legal to me and spectators told me it was legal. But I'm not there.

You were likely watching the swim exit when the bulk of wetsuit guys came out. This is what Sylvan from Sportstats who is timing the event wrote on the other thread:

sylvan

Aug 2, 15 7:33

Post #29 of 33 (154 views)
Re: Water temp at Boulder [AustinDuDude] [In reply to]Quote | Reply

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AustinDuDude wrote:
What are the water temps lots of folks coming out with wetsuits on?
78.1. Over 1200 - over half the field - took the wetsuit option.

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Sylvan Smyth | http://www.sportstats.us | sylvan@sportstats.us | Starvas

First male swimmer out of water 49:23//

If this is true, and the guy did not wear a wetsuit, then the swim was pretty much spot on. The altitude will affect slower swimmers more, and those not from a swim background though. Very easy to go out too hard and have to pay dearly for that. Unlike sea level swims, you do not really recover at all til the swim is done, and you can soft pedal the bike for awhile. That is probably what is happening to the slower folks, going out too fast and blowing sky high..

My 910xt actually produced a reasonable facsimile of the course I think I swam today and I have it at 4,550 yards. I had my slowest IM swim today by 3-minutes (7 total non-wetsuit swims including today, 3 wetsuit), but admittedly wasn't going particularly hard. I live here, too. With the open water swims I've been doing with a wettie at the Res recently, I was projecting a 1:01-1:02. Swam 1:09 without it.

But backed it up with a 4:29 bike split. /brag

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Steve Johnson
DARK HORSE TRIATHLON |

Anybody got a link to full results ?

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Mike

The water temperature was 78.1 but, of course, was not determined until the morning. So the announcer at the swim start kept saying on the PA that it was not wetsuit legal, but wetsuit optional and then he encouraged people to wear them if they did not care about Kona or age group awards. So there was a huge number of people who decided to race with wetsuits. I have no idea how they can tell who raced with them and who did not. There was no formsl mechanism to account for this. The problem was that the wetsuit crowd was sent immediately after the rolling start, so the wetsuit people just crawled all over us non wetsuit swimmers. I swam 1:18 at IMAZ in November, but 1:40 today (yes, I suck). Still pulled off a 1:24:59, because of a fast bike split and a serviceable run. There needs to be a better way to deal with wetsuit swimmers. It was brutal. Maybe a 15 minute delay or something.

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John Snyder @URNotAsCoolAsMe

Strong bike

Hey John, glad to see you in good health and racing. At IM Texas they sent the wetsuit folks out after the non wetsuit rolling start. I THINK they differentiate who did what based on start time. At IM Texas I don't recall any wetsuit guys catching up, but perhaps the folks at the end of the rolling start got swam over by wetsuit folks.

My support crew said the time delta from the last non-wetsuit swimmer was about 90sec, which turned out to be way too short. The whole race team seemed to not have a plan for a wetsuit optional swim, as they announce with 30min to go, that the race was going to start 5min earlier! Made for some early morning panic to get through the massive congestion.

For me the swim was awful (I never swim well at altitude and the non wetsuit and lack of swimming since Canada made for an adventure), the bike good (4:41) and the run subpar (stomach disaster). Ended pretty good with a likely Kona slot though...

J

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"Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go." T.S. Elliot | Cycle2Tri.com
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Random: one thing I figured out about a quarter of the way into the Boulder Peak Tri is that when you're headed east just sight into the sun and you'll be right on course! :p

I arrived at T1 around 5:15 AM and I heard them announce the water temp and that it was wetsuit optional, almost immediately after getting near transition. The wetsuit swimmers started behind everyone else, as usual for a wetsuit optional IM swim, so they did have a plan for wetsuit optional. So it's possible that you didn't hear it was wetsuit optional until 30 minutes before, but they definitely announced it earlier than that and continued to do so. I expected to finish the swim between 1:05 and 1:10 and finished in 1:13, so a little slower but not horribly slower (I live at altitude) and I haven't looked at my garmin to see what distance it shows..

It did seem like a lot of people chose to wear wetsuits. I've done other IMs that ended up wetsuit optional and much less people chose to wear them. Personally, I prefer non-wetsuit and would have overheated in one. From reading comments leading up to the race on the Facebook page it appeared a lot of people have never swam without a wetsuit and didn't think they could do the wetsuit without a wetsuit. I do not understand why those people did not do the practice swims without a wetsuit since the temp was on the border and a over wet suit legal all week.

Yeah, I can only state what I heard, but I did get to T1 and 5:30 and heard nothing till 6am). It was announced very early that it would be swim optional, and my concern was only with the change in the start time that was announced so close to the start, and the lack of real separation from the non-wetsuit swimmers and the wetsuit swimmers.

Jack

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"Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go." T.S. Elliot | Cycle2Tri.com
Sponsors: SciCon | | Every Man Jack

In other wetsuit optional IMs that I've done the wetsuit swimmers just start in the back like yesterday. It woiuldw've been nice if they held them for a few minutes since I think a lot of fast swimmers chose to wear wetsuits yesterday. I've never been passed (or noticed being passed) by wetsuit swimmers in other wetsuit optional IMs but had a lot of them swimming over me yesterday.

I know Garmins aren't 100% accurate, but my 910 showed 2.59 for the swim. I stayed right along the buoy line so I know I wasn't swimming extra.