I just looked at the results. Was the course long, or current (low tide coming in as swimmers return to shore or both?
Sam Laidlaw was just over 51, Lange at 54, many other pros are 55 (Jackson Laundry 55.51, Wurf 55.57 so these guys were almost 5 min behind Laidlaw).
Women’s field has no big names for obvious reasons
I’m not in Kona so can’t answer your Qs, but I do wonder why Lionel, Blu, and Gustav did not swim in this race. I looked at everyone who went under an hour (61 swimmers) and their names were nowhere to be found. Perhaps Talbot will fill us in.
I just saw one file with a 4350m measurement!!!
Well, an extra 500 m would make a huge diff in the times!!! That would Laidlow at around 44:XX.
I am here. I feel like the turn around at the end of the course is the same as IMWC, but this year the Ho’ala swim both started and ended at the beach of the hotel on the other side of the pier, adding distance.
I had 4,040m on my watch.
I spoke with Jackson Laundry after the race (we have the same coach) and his watch had 4,020m.
So yes, course was long.
I had 4119m and the conditions were suboptimal: current and wavy.
Does anyone know who the super fish, Sam Askey-doran, is?
Maybe it is a fake name for @JanSibbersen
Or you both swam long or watches in open water aren’t that accurate. The most likely explanation is that you both swam a little long and your watches aren’t accurate. If the course is set for 3,800m, there isn’t anyone following a black line on the bottom. Everyone will swim long.
In the end, for this and many other reasons, time is a horrible metric for open water swimming. The only thing that really matters in triathlon is time as it relates to your competitors on that specific course.
I hope this helps.
Tim
I also heard the intermediate buoys were not out there and sighting was a challenge.
Correct, sighting was tricky as the buoys were spaced out and there was a bit of swell which made them hard to see at a distance. I had 4050 on the garmin, in my case I didn’t swim straight because of poor sighting but the course was long. We seemed to swim into a current on the way back but over the whole course that evens out.
My buddy who swam said he had 4500 yards and acknowledged he was all over the place, LOL! I arrive Wednesday, have a great race!
I swam it. It definitely seemed long, to some degree vs. the actual course. Started out on the beach and then took you a hard left around a big buoy near the actual start line… then proceeded to head out normally… so that had to add some. And yeah, people were all over the place. My watch said 4300 and change, take that for what it’s worth. But I believe even swimming in straight lines - it was long. Thus the reason for pros going slower.
This name is in the race tracker so i doubt it is a stage name.
They may or may not - DC Rainmaker has a lot of OWS validation data for all the watches out there RE accuracy.
I usually validate my data based on the turn buoy locations. Those are usually pretty distinct in the dataset and with a few kmz files or multiple lap dataset exported to google earth, you can then use the measuring tools to get the “perfect” distance to at least confirm if the course is short, on point or long. One’s watch may confirm this or suggest how efficiently a sight-line was swam.
4,047 meters on my watch. Swam reasonably straight but not perfectly straight. The IM start line is ~100 meters off the beach, and we swam from the beach yesterday. So that plus a bit of navigating seems to account for it. Conditions were good, with the tide going out, off of a bit higher than usual high. As mentioned, not many buoys were set, and there was no boat to sight on at the turnaround, which meant taking a few extra looks down course.
Again, you are assuming that the buoys are perfectly set to the distance. Then how do you normalize for conditions? Bottom line is time is a horrible metric for open water swimming.
No, you don’t assume the buoys are set to the distance, you see where the buoys are in relation to the plotted gps data - the data tracks with each of their uncertainties will let you draw a circle of where the buoy is likely to be and based on where you want the tangents of the track to lie on that circle you can come up with a pretty likely min/avg/max for what the course measures.
I think what he is suggesting is the data will allow one to know with some degree of precision where the buoys actually are, and where the start finish are. Based on that, we can draw the shortest distance for the race. Almost everyone will swim a bit longer just because they have to go around buoys. But with enough files, we know pretty well exactly where the turn buoys are and start and finish from where we can measure with a high degree of precision the length of the course (at least the minimum geometric lengths of each straight line on between points).
I know what he’s suggesting. He’s doing another version of what the watch is doing when it goes under water, loses contact with the satellites and then tries to re-aquire for the less than 1 second it is above water again - it’s guess-timation.
But then we get back to how do you normalize for conditions? You don’t. Time is a horrible metric. You’ve got to go through and see where athletes finished in relation to one another for it to have any worthwhile meaning.