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Most of you have no doubt been following the results of this year’s competition pretty closely, and have been checking out the results for individual athletes. If so you’ve probably also been wondering about some of the incredible mileage recorded by some of these elite athletes, in particular by David Bowne of Jet City Tri.

David, winner of the Bike Session, has as of February 15th amassed over 8,000 miles on his bike. That’s impressive. How can anyone log so many miles so quickly, you might ask. David has kindly agreed to share his story with everyone else competing in the National Challenge Competition.

The NCC has filled a hole in David's life. Seven years ago, David was diagnosed with an illness and had to have a spinal cord implant.  Doctors advised him not to compete in or train for marathons.

Last year, David's 20 year old son was killed in a car accident.  After the tragedy, he went to a therapist and was encouraged to start working out.  David's teammate on Jet City Tri, David Bianchi, encouraged him to use the bike trainer.  He started out slowly, riding only 5 miles at a time, but has increased his mileage to the point where he has now ridden 400 miles in one day.  

David wakes up at 4:00 a.m. and rides the trainer until 7:30 a.m.  He then puts in a full work day and comes home to train again.   Weekends are long as he has logged 100 miles on Saturday & Sunday, 200 miles on a Saturday and Sunday and 400 miles on a Saturday in one session.

This year, the NCC has deeper meaning to the Jet City Tri team. The team is putting together $50 donations into a ‘winner take all’ competition, with the money going to the charity of the winner's choice. David is doing the competition in the name of his son, and if he wins (which seems likely!) his funds will go towards his son’s scholarship fund.  

David's motivation comes from his son’s love for sport. He is aiming to reach 10,019 miles by the end of the competition. The final 19 miles has a significant meaning as it was his son’s favorite number.   In the future, David plans to compete in an Ironman race.

As athletes and friends, we should all be encouraging and supporting David in his final mileage in the competition.

This year, as you probably already know, USAT has implemented a weighting system for swim and run miles. Since those distances are harder to accumulate than bike miles, each swim mile is worth 10 miles and each run mile is worth 3. Simple. 

So which miles are shown on the Race-Tracker site? It depends. Weighted miles are shown in some places, actual miles in others. Here's the breakdown:

Home page total mileage display: actual miles. This is the widget that shows total miles to date for all clubs.

Widgets on the widgets page: actual miles. These are widgets you can embed in your own website with a few simple lines of code.

Standings pages: weighted miles. Since the standings are based on the weighted mileage, these are shown that way. 

Team results pop-up windows: weighted and actual miles. In the standings page, click any team name to see an athlete-by-athlete breakdown of swim, bike and run distances. Both actual and weighted miles are shown.

Statistics page: actual miles. The statistics page shows average and total miles by gender and age group. For the true tri geeks among us.

A quick post to answer some questions club reps have been asking about how to enter swim and run distances.

This year the swim and run distances will be weighted as outlined on the Rules page on the NCC site. Every swim mile will be worth 10 miles, and every run mile will be worth 3 miles. BIke miles remain the same, ie. they are un-weighted. 

The question is "should I enter the actual miles or the weighted miles when I enter distances for my club?"

The answer is enter the actual miles your athletes swim (or bike) or run. The weighted distances will be calculated automatically, you don't have to do that yourself. 

You may enter your swim miles in either yards or meters. The distances will be automatically weighted and converted to miles for the team standings.

Wow. December 2009 will now go down as the most successful swim session in NCC history, with 88 clubs registered and over 260,000 miles covered. Great job to everyone. 

The Official Results will be coming soon from USA Triathlon, but for now here's an unofficial roundup of the results. 

Top Club: Tri Club of San Diego (T1) with 1017.28 swim miles. TCSD also led the pack with an overall distance  of 18,867.42 miles. 

Top Athlete: Kim Rodriquez of the Tri Club of San Diego powered through 136.61 miles in the water. 

Highest Average Swim Miles: Team Fraser Multisport of Fraser Michigan, with only 28 registered athletes, still managed to swim 559.45 miles for an average of 19.98 miles per athlete. 

Top Ten Clubs

1. San Diego T1 (Div 1)
2. F.A.S.T. (Div 2)
3. Jet City Tri (Div 3)
4. Alaska TC Red Biting Bunnies (Div 1)
5. Alaska TC White Wabid Wabbits (Div 1)
6. Buffalo TC
7. Team Fraser
8. DC Tri Club (Div 1)
9. Boulder TC (Div 3)
10. Northwest YMCA TC (Div 4)

The teams without divisions noted above have still not submitted a full roster to USAT, so club reps please make sure you submit your roster as soon as possible. Prizes are being awarded this year based on divisions, so don't miss out.

Next up is the bike session. The session just opened for entering results today and there are already several clubs in the mix. This should be interesting. 

This year we have some brand new ways of slicing and dicing all the data that comes into the site. Since triathletes can never have enough information about their performance(s), we've tried to satisfy at least part of that infolust with some new charts & graphs. 

On each standings page you'll see some cute new little graphs that break down some key metrics for the competition:

• Athletes by Gender: how many men, how many women in the competition
• Athletes by Age Group: how many athletes in each age group
• Session Mileage by Gender:  total current session mileage for men and women
• Session Mileage by Age Group: total current session mileage for each age group

Click the 'more stats' link to see, you guessed it, more stats. There are 24 (!) new charts on this page: 

• Average Mileage by Age Group: for men, women and combined - one for each event plus one for total miles
• Total Mileage by Age Group: again for men, women and combined with one for each event plus total miles