5/3/2023 0 Comments Sidenotes imThis range of athlete profiles produced “base” bike splits on flatter courses spanning from five hours to seven hours in 15-minute increments. To achieve a wider range of athlete profiles, I adjusted the FTP both up and down, holding IF constant and modifying max FTP percentage slightly to maintain a TSS just below 300 for faster athlete profiles or to hit the target “base” time for slower athlete profiles. I used this athlete profile to run splits for all of the bike courses on the North American Ironman circuit, including a few discontinued venues. I specifically chose this first profile to arrive at a “base” bike split on flatter bike courses of about six hours and with a TSS just below 300. My Best Bike Split bike profile was quite accurate, thanks to their prior support and guidance, so I began with that profile, a roughly 2.6 W/kg FTP, a bike IF of 0.70, and a max FTP of 80% to arrive at my first athlete profile. Given that riding all the courses myself while holding variables like weather and fitness constant seemed like a monumental project, I turned to Best Bike Split to simulate these rides for me. Is the bike split differential for two Ironman bike courses the same for all athletes? Can an athlete’s relative bike split across two Ironman bike courses be predicted by the relative elevation gain of the course?Ģ. Feel free to skip straight to the “Results” and “Conclusions” sections if you do not need to revisit middle school.ġ. While the following experiment wouldn’t win any prizes at a middle school science fair, it does provide insight into the relative differences in predicted bike splits for the North American Ironman bike courses and across a wide range of athlete profiles. ![]() So after years of yearning for an Ironman bike course conversion calculator to appear on the Interweb, I finally gave up and ran some calculations myself. Over nearly a decade of coaching and long-course racing, I have anecdotally observed two things about bike courses on the North American Ironman circuit: (1) the relative speed of the course does not always correlate to its elevation gain, and (2) the time differential between two courses is not necessarily the same when comparing athletes of different speeds.
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