Sunday 16 December 2018

UTMB 2019 - How long will it take me?

After two rejections in the ballot, I am finally in UTMB for 2019. I was curious to see what I had left myself in for and how long I would be out there for. Cut off is 46hr 30 and winning time was 20:44.


I have an ITRA ranking of 495 ( https://itra.run/community/david.stuart/646114// ). You can find yours here (  https://itra.run/community/ ). An explanation of the rankings are here: http://76thmile.blogspot.com/2017/02/hardest-itra-races-why-killians-2241.html


Back when I reverse engineered the ITRA rankings, I predicted a UTMB finish time of 39 hours based on my ranking (it was 489 back then).


I pulled out the rankings for roughly 100 finishers of the 2018 UTMB. I looked at the XL ranking because a) The 2018 UTMB would be included in the XXL ranking so the prediction would be somewhat circular b) I don't have an XXL ranking


Ranking is reasonable predictive but with quite a lot of variance. The ITRA predictions are pretty good but there are quite a few highly ranked runners who finished much slower than predicted. 






My ranking of 495 would put me roughly in the middle of the finishers in roughly 39 hours. A few important notes:

- I have only looked at the men's results as the women use a slightly different system. I'm sure there is an easy conversion
- I have only looked at finishers. I suspect the drop out rate for lower ranked runners is way lower than mid to high ranked (excluding the elite racers). A better athlete having a bad day might finish in a slow time but the lower ranked runner would be timed out.

It would be interesting to do this analysis if I had the data.

Here is the table form of the results. I only sampled 100 or so. I would need a few more to smooth out the volatility (some higher ranked groups have slower time due to small sample size).

Rank Time Position Percentile
650 34:06 325 18%
625 33:46 332 19%
600 34:12 312 18%
575 36:19 431 24%
550 35:24 399 22%
525 37:05 496 28%
500 39:05 669 38%
475 41:58 1,036 58%
450 43:36 1,260 71%
425 45:06 1,497 84%
400 45:33 1,592 90%
375 45:35 1,614 91%