Published December 1, 2015 05:00PM
Scout Your Competition In 5 Minutes Or Less
With the advent of more advanced online tools, it’s easier than ever to scope out the competition.
Curious who you’re up against? Here’s how to size ‘em up in five minutes or less.
A friendly rivalry can be motivating, right? With the advent of more advanced online tools, it’s easier than ever to scope out the competition.
1. USA Triathlon Rankings
Rankings.usatriathlon.org
The ability to search rankings has improved substantially over the past year. You can now search a participant list to see who your closest age-group competition is. Here’s how:
– Step 1: Navigate to Rankings.usatriathlon.org and click on “National Rankings”
– Step 2: Filter on the left and search last names against a participant list on the right. Make sure “show unranked” is checked. Take note of your own personal ranking. If someone is a few points above or below, generally you can assume they will be your competition.
You can click on “view races” to see which kinds of races the athlete participated in and how he or she fared comparatively. For example, let’s say you’re doing a half-iron distance and you find the information that the athlete in question has only done sprints to date.
*Drawbacks: The athletes that the USAT search won’t find are those without USAT yearly memberships or international competitors.
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2. Athlinks
Athlinks.com
On Athlinks, you can quickly look up anyone who’s participated in pretty much any official race, and it’s not limited to people in the U.S.
*Drawbacks: It’s not as organized as the USAT rankings plus the results will include everyone who has participated in a charity 5K, so the potential for duplicate names returned by your search is high.
3. Strava
Strava.com
If you want to know details of who did what, when and how fast, Strava is a useful repository of data. If you’re racing a popular race, people have usually set up Strava segments for the bike and run. You can check out the leaderboards on those segments to see who holds the overall KOM/QOMs and sort them by age group, etc.
*Drawbacks: Not everyone uploads everything to Strava, especially swims, so you can’t always get the full picture.