What is a ‘good finish’?

This image has nothing to do with nerding out over race finishes. It may however be a part of a broader vision for what happiness looks like for me on my own terms.

Did you podium?

Goals are important, I won’t knock that. But sometimes I get the feeling that the ‘goal’ of the thing feels just a little artificial — making it Specific Measurable Actionable Realistic and Time-bound (SMART in corporate lingo or DORK for everyone else) gets to be a bit too formulaic to have real meaning. You can technically achieve the quantifiers of each goal measure, while missing the more holistic accomplishments. Goals for me are a little more vision-based, in that I project a vision — a mental mapping of how all the potential components will come together — for what I see having or achieving and then set to work making that version of the future actually happen. For example, when I was unsatisfied with my current state of health and outdoorsmanship I had a vision for what success would look like. In this case that vision was a version of me, 10lbs lighter and 100% stronger with flexible and pain-free back, smiling on a well-tuned bike while confidently bounding through the loamy B.C. mountain bike trails. We’re on our way!

But goals are important, and how do we know if we have realized our potential, or when we are champions in our head but laggards in reality? Races are one way to do this. “Did you podium?” I actually don’t care. The older I get the less excited I am about ‘crushing the competition’ and the more I’m just as happy stopping to take pictures of others racing past me to the finish line. There’s no part of me that takes interest in placing 27th instead of 28th on the way to realizing my goals or vision.

I don’t want to be last.

As unconcerned as I am about my actual placing in races, I don’t want to wallow in the back, happy with only completing in dire physical or mental condition. I can’t shake the suspicion that when people say, “I’m not concerned with how I finish” what they really mean is ‘I’m not sure how I’m going to do because I didn’t put in the work so I will excuse it all away by pretending I don’t care and thus avoid even trying in the first place’. Boiling it all down there are roughly two things I put priority on:

1. Do your best
   This one should be obvious but you need to compete at a level pushing a healthy level of escalation to your abilities
2. Respect the event
   Don’t be that person smugly strolling in 4hrs after dark because you ‘don’t care about competing’ and walked the last 3/4 of a cycling race. The finish line volunteers have a life to return to and waiting for you is not part of it.

At this point you’re thinking that I’ve led myself into a logic trap. If we don’t care about how we place yet place value on a competitive finish, what can that look like? I’ve given it some thought and here’s my solution:

A ‘good finish’ is a time inside 200% of the leader and within the top 80% of finishers

This is where things get a bit nerdy. I ran some analytics of the BC Bike Race, as well as a few other popular mostly non-professional cycling events. I was expecting to see three groups: (1) the pro-dudes, (2) the every(wo)men, (3) the laggards. To my surprise, this wasn’t the case. In fact when you take a look at the cumulative results of the 2015 BC Bike Race there is an almost perfect arc to the results, charting finishing place to time for completion

The 2015 cumulative results for BC Bike Race. Nice even curves.

Moving on to stage results it tells a similar story. A near perfect arc of finishes from winner to looser.

This stage of BCBR had one poor outlier at 8hrs that was about 1hr behind everyone. I’ll presume his chain broke on the trail and he had to fashion a new one out of dried moss and Cliff Bar wrappers.

Does age make a difference? Here are the masters men for one stage from 2014:

The old guys average in about 30 min slower than the open class dudes.

We have established that placings generally fall along an equal distribution from first to last place, with the odd outlier at each end. While some gaps exist there are no clear or patterned groupings we can see we want to fit within.

Next I looked at how far behind the winner the last finisher was.

• BCBC 2015: 279%
• BCBR 2014 Stage 4: 277%
• BCBR 2014 Masters Stage 4: 233%
• Dirty Duo 2015: 249%

Working up from last, I noticed that at ~200% of the winning time (taking twice as long as the winner) puts you at 80% of top finishers for most races. These are nice round numbers and fit with a simple, but grounded, target for what a good finish looks like, no matter the size of event. If you want to get a bit more aggressive, it also seems to work out that finishing with <175% of the winning time puts you in the top 75% of finishers.

So let the spandex race past you, no matter, you can be 5th or 35th but as long as your time is within 175–200% of the winning time you can be reasonably confident you are within the limits of a reasonable time for an event. And being within 75–80% of finishers means you’re a notch above all those folks that inevitably didn’t train or otherwise were unprepared (mechanical failures shouldn’t sway the stats on this).

This may be way too slow or conservative for you, and that’s cool. But for me this feels like a good measure for what a good finish looks like.

Pedal hard!