My First Experience with Ironman70.3 Performance Pool - (Got a slot to Nice70.3 2026 worlds)

So I raced Muskoka70.3. My year has not been going smoothly in general (thankfully I have a very supportive family as well as a superstar management team at my company to keep me sane). Training has been the “outlet” to keep the pressure valve from exploding. Two of my closest friends died in the last 2 years (cancer and heart attack), so I don’t take the ability to do this sport lightly in my first year in 60-64.

Ironman announced its new performance based qual system a few days ago and literally, I was in the first guinea pig group at 70.3 Muskoka.

This was planned as my A race for the year had I not qualified for Marbella worlds at Puerto Rico…if not Tremblant70.3 was planned as A race for a final chance at Marbella. But I got a 1 slot rolldown in Puerto Rico on the “OLD SYSTEM”, so then Muskoka became the season’s A event.

I trained through Tremblant70.3 (race week was 17 hrs, next week was 19 hrs) and then Muskoka week I found out that one of my friends @Dancon7 was racing so there is no way on this earth I am beating him, so probably the single slot for 60-64 is gone. My wife and I had a few days at Tremblant for our 31st anniversary a few days ago and I decided to screw tapering and just enjoy myself riding because even before the race started, the top slot was likely GONE! So what’s the point NOT RIDING and trying to taper LOL.

Then I get a message earlier in the week about the performance pool. My times this year in 60-64 roughtly translate into the 4:30 t0 4:35 range age adjusted for the M60-64 0.82 factor?

The day the factors were released, I started guestimating with my fitness (or lack of thereof hauling around excessive bioprene™ ) I would be slow in the hills and melt in the heat but even then I can get into an age graded 4:30-4:40 range and that could be in the range of 40th to 60th in the performance pool with 30 slots for men and 30 slots for women

Would that be enough to get near a rolldown?

I started having more HOPE than the OLD PROCESS. I don’t run well anymore. In my three races this year, I came off the bike 2nd in my age group and just sucked on the run. In a decades past literally in the last century, I’d leave T2 and reel people in. That was another athlete. My reality today is my top position is coming out of the water, than people pass me as I shuffle thru T1, they pass me on the bike (but not that may), then T2 come and the “racing ends” and its a tour of survival which means if one or two studs shows up my rolldown hopes are slim to zero.

Just two weeks at Tremblant 70.3 I had the 2nd swim, 2nd bike and 15th run and hung on for 4th. Slots went to 1 and 3, but fortunately I had a slot to Marbella.

So if you got this far, let’s get into the performance rolldown process.

I called @sportstats CEO Marc Roy after I crossed the finsih line and asked if they would have the age graded results in the app,

He said as soon as the final finisher is done, a pdf would be uploaded with men’s and women’s finishers in age graded order

Sure enought at 3:55 pm, I opened the Ironman app and in the “info section” the age graded sheets were up.

My swim and bike were good (2nd off bike) and then my layer of bioprene ™ made it tough going up endless hills and the humidity was a disaster. I ran 15 minutes lower than 4 years ago. Sure we all get older, but still.

Final splits 34 + 2:43 + 2:12 = 5:37 or age graded 4:36. The latter put me at 51st overall.

Now the fun.

Awards came and went. I think they should have done “top 3” slot allocation right there to save time, but we went through all the awards, and then they called top three names of each age group in each gender and allocated to the auto slots but all stated to cull the “performance list”. If top three did not take slots they get crossed out of the performance list. If top two don’t take and third does, three get crossed off performance list and slot total for performance list decreases by one.

And so it went. This took some time.

Then they announced of the 30 women’s slot, 9 went to age group top three, 21 to the pool.

They started reading out the women’s peformance list. It went on and on and on. Not that many women takes.

Eventually I went up to the announcer and said, “why don’t you just call up all the women left here in case there are more slots than people left”.

Eventually that’s what they did but not before reading out at least 75 names,

Now over to the men’s side. Ten were taken 20 to performance pool.

I was sitting at 51 in the pool and had roughly calculated how many none takers there were in the top three.

Keep in mind there are 12 male age groups, and in theory if 12 go to the third, we’re sitting at 36 out of the performance pool.

I guestimated there were maybe 25 out of the pool already at this point, leaving me in 26th for 20 slots.

The names got called and quickly I got my name called:

I actually liked this process a lot more. When I was first in 51st, I figured that I am on the outside looking at the winners. Then I say the passes in the auto allocation and started developing hope and a little hope goes a long way. I think I can say that of everyone hanging around for rolldown. Everyone seemed to be doing some level of mental lottery gymnastics.

I don’t recall how far the pool it went.

With worlds in early Sep, it really is a disaster timing for more people with young famlies and schools and activities starting. If you’re in 35-49, there can’t possibly a worst time for worlds.

Meanwhile in my age group 60-64 most the guys are retired and can go. I’m working but I have my own company so dammit things are getting organized around me in France in early Sep 2026.

Overall even if I did not get a slot, I liked the experience. When I got passed from 2nd to 3rd with 1.5 km remaining, I could have gotten completely deflated, but the hope of performance slots kept me from breaking into a complete “walk” and I kept the pressure on, My heart rate was 170-175 bpm but I kept going (that’s high for me at this age…I used to race marathons at 180 when I was 28 though).

Some suggestions

  1. Get the outright top 3 allocated after they get their trophies and get that process rolling asap
  2. start immediately after awards with performance pool
  3. right now ironman app publishes a one time pdf after all finishers are in. Better would be to have our raw time, age group position and provisional age graded results as soon as we cross the line and updated all afternoon until final finisher is in

Overall I really liked the process. I think it is way more fair because rather than one age group having their 60th place getting a rolldown and in another age group top 1 or top 2 get slots we get everyone graded by performance and rewarded with relative merit.

Now this is for 70.3. I would say on the balance males needed to be more competitive than women because in the latter the slots rolled to whoever stayed to get them. But at full Ironman with the slots mixed, that won’t be the case.

One of the guys asked if the women don’t use all their slots can they roll over to men, to which I replied “I don’t think so, because its two different races with two days of racing”

For others at Muskoka or the 70.3 in Sweden today, let me know your thought and for those who are yet to experience the new system, if you place your questions in this thread, we can ask @sportstats to convey them to Ironman

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Congrats - sounds like you deserved it clearly as well with your deep background and 17-19hrs/wk in the leadup!

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maybe one thing they could do is ask for people to indicate their intention prior to the roll down and then they can more easily skip over all the people who indicate that they would definitely NOT go to the worlds, even with 30% compliance it would save some time, if people could (up until 1 hour before the rolldown) indicate and update their status so that if for example 8 people from 4th - 12th all said NO i won’t go, then the roll down just goes from person #3 in the performance pool straight to the 13th person who is next and so on. So 3 statuses would be NO, YES or either Not sure/didn’t respond in which case they get 3 call outs to respond.

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I think they just need to say, “to there are 40 slots, use the CPU implanted in each of you skulls to quickly self sort into a line”.

If the line is 100 people long the back half can immediately go home without wondering.

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There should be a system, where you say yes or no to a slot before the race, then they just take into account the people who are interested from the get-go!

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I thought I remembered there was a box to check on the entry form to indicate if you were intending to try and qualify for the World’s. Maybe I am old and that was when we used to lick a stamp and stick it on the envelope before posting the entries off. :rofl:

I think they did this during Covid, when there was no awards and they then emailed you if you had indicated you wanted to. You indicated at registration if you intended to qualify when collecting race number. I don’t see why it cannot be done similar and those not interested removed from the list.

I thought about this, but the problem is the line has to be in order of age adjusted finish. The problem is literally no one there knew that the age adjusted sheet was in the app at 3:55 pm.

Really all that has to happen is rather than waiting for the “final sheet” after the last higher age group finishers, they simply add age adjusted time and age adjusted position to all our names in the app. Then everyone can just check the app and get in line and those who don’t want to go can cross off their names in advance. If they do that, and they give out the 1-3 age group single slot allocation right at awards, they can cross off these names from the performance pool in advance,

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at Muskoka 70.3 in 2013 this is what they did. At check-in you indicated if you were vying for a Worlds slot or not.

Thanks for the report. This is fantastic! I will be racing in your AG next year for a shot at Nice. I have no clue how this works, but I will be hiring a coach and ramping up considerably. Like you, I am near top of AG off the bike, but I am a terrible runner now. I need to lose another 15 lbs. and regain some lost running ground. Ideally, I will be close to a 5-hour finisher by spring 2026 which could be good enough.

Yeah, I gained 7 lbs over last year of bioprene (TM pending). It hurts biking up the hills and running up the hills, but the worst part of that extra layer of fat is it is built in wetsuit that you have to run inside. We had 29C and crazy humid (much more humid than Kona that we get in Southern Ontario yearly…more like Houston or Carribbean Humidity) and I paid badly. My average heart rate on run was 171 and my max was 191 and that was running a 2:12…pathetic. 33 years ago running a 2:48 open marathon, that’s the range that I used to run in, but I have NEVER seen such a high range in the last 5 years in a half IM run, but I think because of the new system I was running scared in TT mode (as slow as I was), trying to avoid this turning into a 2:20 or 2:30 walk/hike and losing places in the performance pool.

I would also say it is easier to qualify from North America than Europe, because it is just plain hard for North Americans to dissappear from work in Early Sep for a European trip due to back to school/back to acivties/back to full compliment workforce

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Hey Devashish, I was there at Muskoka as well. Wow…what a scorcher of a day, so congrats for getting that one one. Tough course for sure. I agree on your points. If you’re not there to accept your award, the top 3 worlds spot allocation should be done there so they know immediately how many go to the performance pool and that can get started right away. Even the announcer Greg totally agreed with this, but had to follow the rules. I’m sure they’ll refine this process, as the awards process is already way too long…

Seems cumbersome to even put the 1st place AG in the pdf list. Their age graded time doesn’t ever come into play, does it? They are never really in the performance pool. Either you are taking the slot as AG winner or you are not…

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The entry forms stopped asking in roughly 2015-2016 whether or not you had intent to qualify for worlds, and just assumed everybody did.

I kinda alluded to this point in my whole “make everybody the Open Division, then opt into the age group slots” article when they announced the ODiv.

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While it seems cumbersome to put the first place person in the performance list as they don’t factor in I can see “viewing the performance list” in itself a sort of psychological competition. I ended up 51st on performance list…dammit, I much prefer 49th or 39th or 29th, or 19th or ninth. Coming at 11, 21, 31 etc on anything vs 09, 19, 29 weirdly makes a psychological difference (I know it shouldn’t but I can see that list taking on its own life form and that’s cool).

I’d like to see the performance pool standings generated at 70.3 worlds and 140.6 worlds too. I think that would be cool

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There should be 2 different sections of the report:

  1. Overall adjusted finish including AG winners - good to see how you stack up against everyone
  2. Take #1 and remove the AG winners - used for slots. If slots are passed up by the AG winners, its easy to move down the performance pool.

Added bonus if you can do both of the above in the App under separate categories.

@devashish_paul thanks for the note, I am not longer CEO FYI. Sportstats will take a lot of the feedback over the next few months of course and work closely with all parties involved to improve the experience. I see a lot of comments of collecting data prior I.e Yes or No on the qualification, we found that this does not work well as people change their minds. Cheers

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Haha, I forgot you are living the dream lifestyle now and having another slave be the CEO of the company LOL!!! All well deserved. Let’s see the commentary coming in and suggestions as on this forum you have a great cohort experienced with performance and rolldowns to give inputs

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I saw your name way up in the performance pool and I thought I recognized the name, but I did not see @drluke12 which is what I kind of know you as!!!

Yup. finished 7th in the overall performance pool that also has the AG winners. 3 M50-54 in the top 7!

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