A few conversations I’ve had on other boards have sorta circled around questions like “is Zwift making us faster triathletes?” Or, “now that everyone uses a power meter, are overall IM race results better than 15 years ago?”
These ambiguous questions aside, I really don’t know the answers to these, but it did get me thinking about how one would even set out to get the answers , given the available data. Of which there is now tons.
Having seen lots of really smart folk and others on ST offer up models of how to compare things like “the fastest fields in Kona,” or other larger scale, multi-year comparisons, id love to hear how one would set out to answer big data questions like that. Would you Compare population field and finisher data from a few consistent sample races over each of their 20-30 years? Compare representative sample sets of all IM data to create longitudinal profile?
Question is equal parts curiousity and personal learning opportunity.
These ambiguous questions aside, I really don’t know the answers to these, but it did get me thinking about how one would even set out to get the answers , given the available data. Of which there is now tons.
Having seen lots of really smart folk and others on ST offer up models of how to compare things like “the fastest fields in Kona,” or other larger scale, multi-year comparisons, id love to hear how one would set out to answer big data questions like that. Would you Compare population field and finisher data from a few consistent sample races over each of their 20-30 years? Compare representative sample sets of all IM data to create longitudinal profile?
Question is equal parts curiousity and personal learning opportunity.