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Kona round-up: A look at Lionel Sanders’ power data from the 2016 Ironman World Championship

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Popular training app Training Peaks has released the data of  some of the top pros’ power on the bike at Saturday’s Ironman World Championship race.  Canada’s own Lionel Sanders, known as an uber-cyclist in the sport, was featured and as expected produced some incredible numbers on the second portion of the triathlon. Here’s an analysis of his race, which earned him the top Canadian male pro finish, by the numbers.

Sanders was disappointed with his 29th place finish at Kona this year, but it wasn’t the bike that caused him to suffer and fall outside of a top-10 finish. The 70.3 North American champ explained on his blog that he was “amazed I was even able to do what I did at Kona this year,” given his focus on the half distance in preparation for September’s 70.3 Worlds. His Kona ride was the longest ride he had completed since Ironman Arizona in November 2015 but he still averaged 299 W (306W normalized power) for the duration of the 180-km ride which translated into 40.6 km/hour. According to Training Peaks, while that is a very big number, it is only 77 percent of his Functional Threshold Power, as shown by his .77 Intensity Factor.

Sanders’ ride was the 13th fastest of the pro men’s race in a time of 4:29:35. He was roughly just six minutes slower than the fastest bike split of the day which went to Germany’s Boris Stein.

You can view the full details of the ride here.

The Training Peaks article also includes the data for pros Michael Weiss, Jesse Thomas, Sarah Piampiano and fourth place finisher Ben Hoffman.