Wednesday, August 1, 2007

The new phonebooks are here!

The 2007 USATriathlon rankings are out. I'm not quite near the top, but it shows how far I've come in a year.

The rankings are of course an ordering, but they also include a raw score which is roughly the average winning time as a percentage of your finishing time.

In 2006, my final ranking was 4664 out of 4695 Men between 35-39 (bottom 0.7%) . My score was 48.58, which means that I took a little more than twice as long to finish a triathlon as the winners did (2.06x).

In 2007 (so far), my ranking is 4021 out of 4583 Men between 35-39 (bottom 12.3%). My score is 57.98, which means that I take about 72% longer than the winners do (1.72x).

Again, I'm not going to win any age group awards at that kind of ranking, but it helps me to remember that the improvement is coming. Considering that the top 2% or so of each age group qualifies for Hawaii, it also is a good reminder how lonely it's going to be at the back of the pack there. For example, if I had my exact times and was 79 years old, I still wouldn't be in the top 10% of my age group nationally. There's even an 81 year old man who has a higher score (62.9). There are some tough dudes who do well what I do stubbornly.