craigj532 wrote:
Approximately 15% of the competitors in M40-44 and 25% of the people in the entire race finished in over 12 hours.
So, the answer is that there aren't that many slow people in Kona.
Good post in a good thread. There are a lot of good answers to the OP, and I think that if you asked everyone in that age group who finished in 12h+, they would find the explanation for their performance somewhere in this thread.
Based on this response (15% in M40-44 over 12 hours), I'd say that I'm surprised it is that low!
If you (after removing all the legacy and charity participants) take a fairly large population of guys who can go 10 hours and faster on a course of their choosing on what almost certainly was a very good race, and then have them compete again in a remote location on a hard course in historically difficult weather, add in random injuries, pacing issues, choices to "just finish and get the medal," and "have a family trip" and "went too hard and blew up" and everything else, I'm a little surprised that the distribution doesn't skew even harder to the slow slide.