Analysis Girl's take on LT100

Analyzing the Leadville 100 trail run  - it's more involved than a typical race. There’s quite a bit of data. There are many ways to slice and dice that data. There’s a little bit of luck that is intrinsic in the data, impossible to separate.

The big Mo picture:
Finish in 27:19:16. 142rd overall of 362 finishers, of 647 starters, of 797 entrants.
12th woman overall of 52 finishers, of 96 starters, of 120 entrants.
3rd in my age group of 16 finishers, of 29 starters, of 40 entrants.  The 2nd woman in my AG was 2.5 hours ahead of me. The 4th woman was 15 minutes behind me. Clearly there is a big difference in ability and execution between 2nd and 3rd. A very bimodal distribution.

Ok, so even the big picture is complicated. But I was in the top 23% of women finishers, and top 40% overall.

I like comparing 1st half to 2nd half times. Very few people even split this race. Matt Carpenter did, when he set the course record. A handful of people have done it. This graph tells the story:

My first half (start to time leaving Winfield inbound) = 12:04
My second half (Winfield to finish) = 15:15
My ratio, then, is 1.27, right on the leading edge of the peak. 440 of the historical finishing runners had more even splits, 960 had less even. What does this mean? In the context of my condition during the race (good to excellent) and my condition afterwards (felt like I could have kept going) perhaps it means that (yet again) I was too conservative. Perhaps it means that I balanced my effort just right on the first half. Maybe it means nothing more than that my training prepared me well to resist exhaustion, and that my endurance was up to the task of moving forward for 27 hours.

The garmin data for the first half says:
Total time: 12:04
Moving time: 11:23

This story is not so rosy. 41 minutes of sitting still? In the first half? Um. That’s excessive. And this is before I started dawdling through the aid stations (twin lakes, fish hatchery, and may queen) on the way back. Which I DID. A LOT. Plus, I know that outbound at May queen the time was 30 seconds or less. Fish Hatchery more like 5 minutes. Pipeline and halfmoon – nothing.  And I was quick through the Hopeless pass station, let’s say 2 minutes. Then let’s be generous, and give a minute for every bathroom break and the blister care = 7. So the bulk of that time, at least 27 minutes of it, has to be split between Twin Lakes and Winfield. I don’t think I was in Twin lakes more than 10 minutes.  Apparently Winfield was just a wee bit distracting for me.
I would estimate that on the return trip, I spent at least 60 to 80 minutes in the aid stations. 15 for sure at Twin lakes, fish hatchery and may queen. Yowza.I'm glad I had the time to give away, or that amount of dawdling could have cost me the finish.

Anyway you look at that, it is a lot of time to give away. My middle name shall now be dawdle. (I have no regrets – this is just analysis.)

The devil and the details:
Let’s look at this by section.

I wish these splits had the AS times broken out. But they don’t . I don’t even know where the timing mat was – on the way into the AS, or on the way out? So the pace includes all the dawdling time.

For the first 40 miles, my estimates were close to right on (I didn’t know the distances between FH and HM, and HM and TL, but if those segment times are added together, I estimated 3:35 for FH to TL, and completed it in 3:36). Hope pass was not as hard as I thought it would be, so I started getting ahead on pass one, then on pass #2 I did even better and got further ahead.

During the night, I didn’t slow as much as I expected, and ran quite a bit of the distance. Feeling good made it easy to get further and further ahead of my estimations.

It’s interesting to see that on the inbound Fish Hatchery to May Queen section from midnight to 4 am, that I was keeping a pace only slightly faster than the Winfield to Twin Lakes section over hope pass, from mile 50 to 60.5. And that it was 8 minutes per mile slower than my outbound time.  Yikes. Not unexpected at all in the dark, after 75 miles, but still, a lot to slip away.

And now, after putting this together after several weeks, I must publish it and MOVE ON for crying out loud.
I PR’d a 5K at the Pinto Bean fiesta – 7 weeks post Leadville. I PR’d my 2.5 mile weekly race this week. Recovery is well over. I’m looking for another 5K around thanksgiving in hopes of going ~20:30. Woot!