GLOBAL PERFORMANCE INDEX IN TRIATHLON

Abstract

PURPOSE: The aim of this study is to evaluate the relative importance of each modality in the result of the IRONMAN® World Championship race at Kona. METHODS: All the analyses were made from 1981 until 2018, considering just the male professional triathletes that appeared, at least, 5 times between the TOP 10 finishers. 24 triathletes were selected. Their racing times were converted into seconds. The analysis was made in a global way and by modalities (swimming, cycling and running). A global performance index (GPI) and a specific performance indexes were created for the triathletes for each modality: swimming performance index (SPI), cycling performance index (CPI) and running performance index (RPI). Afterwards, we calculated the correlation between the stages and made a regression with the overall performance as an independent variable and the relative performance in each stage (SPI, CPI and RPI) as dependent variable. In the regression analysis, we used the “Enter” method to force the entry of all the dependent variants. RESULTS: The final equation to evaluate the Global Performance was: GPI= (0,324 x SPI) + (0,871 x CPI) + (1,07 x RPI). When the correlation between the stages was analyzed, we observed a negative correlation between SPI and RPI (0,403). This finding contradicts most of the studies that put cycling as the crucial stage in a long term triathlon race like IRONMAN® CONCLUSIONS: This results can confirm that in triathlon races, being a good swimmer can be very important, despite the swimming stage be less representative. In general, the running stage is the most important of the race, based in the analysis of the correlation between the 3 modalities. Running is crucial, but this analysis is very complex, because the 3 stages are not independent as far as the effort made in one stage tends to impact the performance on the next one.