You can also do the same for other distances. Most any organized triathlon will post the results online, and most of them don't require that you actually raced in the race or whatever. That is a really great question though. I'm excited to see the responses.

Well, for what it's worth, I would consider myself a weak cyclist. For my first 70.3 I avg'ed 15.1 mph which improved to 16.0 on my 2nd 70.3. For my first (and only, thus far) IM I had a 14.6 avg, though in the category of too much information, I over-hydrated and had 30 minutes in stoppage time. Subtract that out and I'm at 15.6 mph. Take home message: wear a two piece suit or better yet, get used to peeing while riding (I can't pee in my wetsuit, either). Anyway, those paces but me pretty squarely in the bottom 25%. Compare that to my friend who maintained a 16.9 mph pace at IM Coeur D'Alene and he was in the middle 50%. Looking over the results for the CDA IM last year, 18-19 mph would put you in the top 25%. Pros and top age groupers were mostly putting down 19.5-22, with the top two finishers @ 23.3 and 23.7 mph. Needless to say, dist, course, and conditions will all impact pace. Hope that helps.

And let me add: Make sure your shoes have holes to allow the pee to exit. Found that out the hard way.

do people actually pee while running?

i'm not sure I can grasp caring that much about speed

This suggests what I think is generally accepted that the bike is a reasonable predictor of overall results since it's so much of the race. I wonder how that would look for the swim and the run. Possibly less tidy. If so, I wonder if the nonconforming points tend to be on one side of the curve or the other for the swim versus the run, or if it's all over the place.

What an ominous post...you must be speaking from experience. I cringed a little when I read that

I know I'm a beginner, but I can't imagine wanting it that bad

I was actually doing a little MotionBased stalking (website where you upload GPS tracks) for various competitors at last year's HIM California. I found about 20 or so people who had uploaded their GPS data from the race, representing a pretty fair range of average speeds from about 15 to 23 mph. One trend I noticed in some of the 18-19mph folks was that there were a few points where their speed plot dropped to zero momentarily (Garmin auto-stops when you stop moving, so I don't know how long they were stopped) representing a bathroom break, a full stop at an aid station, something like that. Other than that, their graphs were almost direct overlays of the folks who had 20-21mph speeds, but who never stopped moving the whole time they were on the bike. Now without knowing more about these people and without a really fine level of granularity in the graphs it's impossible to say whether this was truly the sole factor, but I can't help but think that it hurts them a lot.

I actually tried to practice peeing while riding the other day and couldn't do it! I was really afraid of pissing all over myself, though, because it was extremely windy (was going for the off-to-the-side method not the just-go method). Not worth it for a training ride.

peeing your pants just seems so wrong

I don't know how any of you all can dare disagree with y expert opinions....i mean look at my time, from my 1 triathlon ever completed.....i think it speaks for itself ;)

and if you pee backwards with enough force it will actually propel you forward

Bah. That's almost as silly as buying a disc wheel that supposedly propels you forward.......

just "could?"