WAM 25km Post Race Analysis

I finished!

In previous posts I looked at historical Whistler Alpine Meadows 25km race results and applied some simple predictive modelling to help set a personal race goal of 4 hours.  Between those posts and race day, a grizzly bear decided to hang around the trails (maybe getting ready for some race day snacks), which resulted in a total revamp of the courses for all distances.  Coast Mountain Trail Series did an amazing job of making all these changes in the final 2 weeks and still pulling off an amazing event.  The new course was super technical and showed off some of the beautiful scenery around Whistler.  The chief difference though was that the new course had about half the total vertical acsent/descent of the original course.  I suspected that this would result in much faster times and my original goal probably wouldn’t be challenging enough.  Looking at the swarm plots for all three years shows that’s exactly what happened, as 2018 racers were significantly faster than previous years.

Here are the same results in a violin plot with the 25%, 50% and 75% quartiles identified.  You can see median is a lot lower than 2016 or 2017 and sits just over 200 minutes.  My time of 3 hrs and 17 minutes (197 minutes) was just faster than the median.

Let’s see how I did against my age group of 40-49, where I show up as the purple dot among the light blues.  Definitely not in the top half, as I finished 27th out of 38 in this group.  Room for improvement in my race management, I faded quite a bit in the last 5 km as my legs began to cramp, and a number of runners passed me.  I think I can do a better job of staying fully fueled during the race to minimize fatigue.

All in all it was a great event, and a ton of fun.  Look forward to next year!