Ilkley Tri 2008 - in stats!

Okay, first off, I'm aware that my love of stats is not shared by the rest of you. Additionally, I know that Nom and Fromage profess not to be bothered about their final positions next year (I'd be willing to bet real money that this isn't the case by next September). I even know that the information presented below might make Veg a sad panda-ess. But you should read anyway, because I'm awesome.

Anyway. What I did tonight (after getting bored with Arsenal living up to the first syllable of their name in the Champions' League) was get all the results from the Ilkley Tri 2008 (from a .pdf file on the LTB website), take all the relays out (because they don't really count), and play around with the numbers. What I wanted to find out was which discipline has the greatest effect on finishing position (more or less the same as finishing time).

I was confident beforehand that the bike leg would be the most important. It's the longest, after all. I was right:

r^2	Swim	Bike	Run
Time	0.447	0.808	0.764
Rank	0.444	0.911	0.810

How to read the table: r^2 is basically a measure of the relationship between two sets of data, 0 being no relationship, 1 being an exact relationship. A bike rank - total rank score of 0.911 is really, really close.

A graph? Here:
If my A-Level physics experiments yielded graphs like that, people would think I'd faked the results. (They'd probably be right.)




What this means for normal people, of course, is that the bike leg will be vitally important for those trying to get a good result next year.

In other words, lots of cycling in 2009!

PS. The bit which might make Veg a sad panda-ess is the fairly weak relationship between swimming and finishing position. I suppose the problem with the swim is that the difference between a good swim and an average one is about 2 minutes, which really isn't a lot in the grand scheme of things. So that's something for Nom and Fromage (and my shoulder) to feel good about.