Looking at smaller races without a dedicated “Pro” category

There are a lot of long-distance races on the schedule that are not quite as big as WTC-branded Ironman or Challenge races. Probably the biggest of these is evens in the Rev3 series which mainly offers 70.3 distances but also has a few long races. I’ll have a closer look at the Rev3 races soon, but for now I want to have focus on some “unaffiliated” races.

In order to figure out what to do with these races, I had a closer look at three races:

• Norseman: One of the fantastic races that add a great, scenic course to the long distances
• Vineman: Another “pretty race”, but one that also has a long history – it’s probably the oldest Ironman distance race on the North American continent (i.e. not counting Kona)
• Ostseeman: An example of the smaller, non-affiliated races (and very dear do me, as this is one of the IM-distance races I have done and just one hour drive from where I live)

While I like these races, analyzing them with a Pro focus (such as I have for trirating.com) is tricky:

• they don’t have a dedicated “Pro” category (making it hard to identify the Pros, especially new ones or those that have recently changed names)
• very few Pros compete in these races (I already have some “matching” algorithm to deal with slight spelling differences, but even with that I can’t identify too many Pros)
• even if I can identify a Pro, older results may be from back when they were still racing age-grouper (and including these result would skew their “Pro” rating)

In short, I have very few good data points for these races, making an analysis very hard and probably not very meaningful. Therefore, I have decided to focus my work on other races and the questions related to these.

Having said this, by pulling together all “Pro” results from all the years I managed to come up with an “unofficial” course rating for Norseman:

As this is not a result of my usual calculation procedure, I will not include this in my list of course ratings. Still, these numbers give a good indication how hard the Norseman course is.