devashish_paul wrote:
RowToTri wrote:
Yeah - I suppose I'll have to finish at least second or first I'm my AG to grab the kq without relying on getting lucky with a roll-down. I did a little snooping on the athlete list and there are 4 or 5 speedy guys at least. One is a former pro who's in France so he may not want to deal with the hassle of coming over but who knows. The others are all in the US. It'll be tough to grab the slot.
It is always tough to grab a spot, but the first filter to grabbing a spot is showing up at the start line, second filter is finish, third filter is how well you pushed yourself, and the final one is who else did 1 through 3 better than you.
This could swing both ways. You could get an ultra deep field all pent up, with extra time to train, ripped and ready to produce a lifetime best....you can also get very talented fast people waffling on motivation and finally stepping up in hope of getting in shape fast enough....and you can get those who are in the same boat as me who would love to go, but quarantines don't allow practical participation (I can't go to Hawaii and then spend days in a govt run hotel for quarantine and then be in a quarantine for the rest of time and try to practically run my company). I would say that by and large, your chances are improved over a normal year for a KQ.
I've learned something about the Honu in normal times and that is there is always huge gaps from the front end to the MOP, more so than any other race I've done. Part if is likely that if you don't come prepared, even if you are a top end athlete, the blow-out is epic and you finish close to 5 hours or above. But there always around 2-3 guys who come ready to win and perform to win and they do 4:30 or under. I definitely talk more about the M30-45 groups that I keep an eye on and am part of or will be but the gaps generally apply to most AGs.
Of course this year is quite unknown but the question I have is how did the times at St. George compare to prior years? Not talking about straight up speed times but more so how were the gaps between 1st and 5th, 1st and 10th etc to get an idea of if it was more competitive than prior years. That would provide some insight as to what one could expect racing this.
I am not going this year, regardless of whether they hold it since I have been unable to swim outside of sparse summer open water swims.
808 > NYC > PDX > YVR
2024 Races: Taupo