Swimming Statistics and Race Difficulty

Karl_Kingery

Here is a very well thought out and executed discussion on the difficulty of the 2017 Rottnest Channel swim. It would be interesting to do this same analysis with other races held year to year like END-WET, where current can lend a heavy hand.

http://swimsmoothperth.blogspot.com.au/2017/03/so-just-how-hard-was-rottnest-channel_9.html?m=1

evmo

Good stuff, thanks for sharing Karl.

So many unknown and/or unmeasured variables in OWS, these sorts of analyses will almost always be "pushing the data a very long way," as Paul says... but it's still fun to play around with.

Rottnest lends itself well to analysis - many years of available data, consistently large field (sample) size, and many of the same people competing year-to-year.

Smaller fields, fewer years of data --> less amenable to analysis.

Karl_Kingery

Definitely "pushing the data a very long way" but it is fun to think about.

With a variety of different swims and data, perhaps some interesting conclusions could be drawn from "between the data" on wind effect on swimmers, current effect on swimmers, effect of wetsuits, comparative difficulty of swimming in Force 5 vs Force 3 conditions etc. etc.

endracing

At first glance this looks like a fun analysis. I've been doing bits and pieces of analysis on the END-WET data as we get more finishers--the results sheet is set up for easy import into R or another stats package without redoing headers or creating useful columns. You can see some plots at https://endracing.com/end-wet/course-book.

I'll read through a little more closely and see if I can do any comparisons. The discharge of the river is a big factor, but I think I can predict the mean finish time with a little more curve fitting...

--Beek