I have had interesting discrepancies with the clock and my watch, particularly during the swim.
I am not a fast swimmer. I did IMAZ '10 in 1:36, at least according to the official timing, I did not compare to my watch. In Lousiville this year, i started my watch about 15-20 secs before I jumped in for the time trial swim, I got out and my watch said 1:22, the official time was 1:26. (I never saw the race clock) wondering why the difference between the two times? it certainly did not take me four minutes to get from where I exited the water to the timing mat.
IMAZ 2011 - I had a disastrous swim. did not wear a watch and was not cognizant of the time. I saw the race clock at the end of the swim showing 1:52. My official time in the results was 1:56. again, how did it take me four minutes from where I saw the race clock which may even have been after i came across the timing mats? Separately, I have taken it from a friend and reading elsewhere that the race clock showed the pro time which was started approximately 13 minutes earlier than the AG time.
so my curiosity further continues: what time does the clock over my head at the finish show? AG time? pro time? my actual time? I know they nailed the bike time to the second to be what i had on my joule and i think the run time is pretty good, though I forgot to stop my garmin at the finish. I know for IMKY that this has to be adjusted per the time trial start and that the time over your head is NOT the time you did… but still, why was my swim time four minutes different than my recorded swim time there?
has anyone else had any experience with these same issues?
In all of the chaos and battling around at the swim start your watch could have hit the “stop” and “start” button a few minutes later. Happens to me all the time.
In all of the chaos and battling around at the swim start your watch could have hit the “stop” and “start” button a few minutes later. Happens to me all the time.
This is probably what happened… I race with just my timex ironman (non gps) watch. I will usually put it on chrono and start the stop watch about 10 seconds before the swim start and then i put the watch into time of day mode. this disables the stop/split functionality (at least on my watch) so you shouldn’t have the problem of having the split/stop/start buttons getting inadvertently hit during the swim portion.
The clock over your head will be your actual time… assuming a mass start (with IMLou being the obvious exception). The clock runs the pro time until a certain time (probably when the last pro finishes or some predetermined time), so you will see a lot of really fast AG’ers (the sub-9:30 crowd) finish line clock times being off because the clock is still set to the pro start time.
As for your watch being off - what type of watch are you using? If it’s just a regular old watch that tells time and has a stopwatch, I don’t know why. If you’re using a GPS watch, I’d bet you have some setting enabled that is causing some sort of autopausing because of the GPS signal loss in the water.
using a garmin 310XT, i know the watch for IMLV wasnt restarted at all. more questioning the time on the clock at IMAZ last week, particularly my swim time. Coach Rich was at the exit and told me i was at 1:40, and i heard from another ENer as well as a 3rd datapoint from a posting here on ST that the race clock after the swim was 13 minutes off from the actual time due to the pro-starts…
while i did not do a ton of swimming between IMLV & IMAZ, i would not have expected to lose a half an hour of swim time!!!