Some Data from the Divide (TD 14 data visualiztion)

[seabiscuit]

Hey All,

I made a data visualization using the data available at Trackleaders.com. The results are at least a bit interesting, check out a screenshot below (but click through to the link above for the full story).

The underlying data is a Google spreadsheet here - if you see something out of place please comment the sheet.



Full disclosure - I work for Tableau, the company that makes the data viz software and who hosts the public site the viz is on. (So, pretty much a professional data nerd).

[Val Garou]

Impressive bit of work.  Some of the charts aren't exactly intuitive to read, but once I got oriented, they did a great job.  The relationship between rider age and outcome was particularly interesting.

[richpips]

Interesting stuff. Seems most people who scratched, did so within the first week and with less than a 1/3rd of the distance covered.

[seabiscuit]

Awesome - glad you liked it. I really liked putting together Bikes vs. Miles  - it was always pretty obvious that the Salsa family was on top, but it was kinda cool to see who's in 2nd through 10th and to know that getting a Fargo doesn't guarentee completion.

Let me know if you have suggestions on making it more readable.

[richpips]

What does active mean?

[bmike-vt]

curious, can you overlay on a map where folks dropped based on last SPOT data?
would be interested in seeing that spread.

also something i've done by hand (tedious) is to look at sleep / rest locations. not sure if you can pull that from the SPOT data - say, downtime of 4 or more hours and drop points on a map.

very cool stuff. kind of hard to read some of the charts, but once you get into it a bit its not bad.

[SlowRide]

Interesting stuff. Seems most people who scratched, did so within the first week and with less than a 1/3rd of the distance covered.

That may have had to do with the 6 days of hell and hypothermia we endured to start the race, bikes were dying, bodies were dying, the wills of many men and women were dying, we were pushing through the muck having to earn every inch with our tires sinking in 1/2" on roads that were turned to slow poison, it was raining day and night non-stop, ~40F degrees out, and was sapping at least twice to three times the physical energy the route would normally take, I can't even begin to think about the mental energy comparison. I'm just glad my body, bike, and mind held up and I kept pedaling to Mexico.

Pretty cool visualization, thanks for taking the time seabiscuit.

[SlowRide]

What does active mean?

"Active" means "still going." At this point I would guess that those who are marked active are actually scratches, but there may be some special exceptions. I noticed Terry_Brannick_ITT is listed in the data as active, he scratched on his Grand Depart YoYo(Terry_Brannick_Yo) attempt and then came back late summer as an ITT(Terry_Brannick_ITT) and finished a SoBo run. Kudo's to him for taking another swing and hitting a home run.

[richpips]

"Active" means "still going."

That's what I thought. Must be cold out there now. 

[seabiscuit]

I'll be re-publishing with the latest data from Trackleaders shortly, but even so most of the ITT riders are still 'active' there. I'm in touch with Scott about getting the data in a more digestable format which should help me keep it up to date.

Great ideas bmike-vt - not too hard to do if I get the raw gpx traces, but I don't have those (yet).

A couple folks have mentioned that some charts were hard to read - tell me which ones and I'll make them better.

[mikepro]

Nice visual data work.  Thanks for sharing.  Some suggestions for version 2.0:
1. Re-name the "how soon could you expect to know if you'd finish?" table/page.  It's misleading.  Better to call it 'Age vs. Duration', or something much simpler.
2. Provide a legend or a key that explains why some data point shapes are larger than others, where the shapes (circle, square, cross, dot) represent one person - for example, I can't figure out why in the "132 people, ..." first table/page, some units are represented by a different shape than others and why some of the shapes are a different size than others.
3. Change the 4 Actives to Unknowns, for now.  They are truly not active, just tracker hasn't closed them out yet.  And, the one Active you are showing for Walter Brumniach - I'm pretty sure he finished - either ran out of batteries or didn't turn on his spot the last day or half-day.
4. Do you capture Northbound racers/riders, too (I can't find them)? Or just Southbound?
5. I don't see Jefe B 1st place finish showing up anywhere in your data.

[ScottM]

This is great work, seabiscuit.  Love the data-geekery.

bmike-vt : On every rider's individual map you can find tent icons for locations where they stopped for 4 hours or more.  It's not perfect (since SPOT data isn't perfect) but the data is there.  Seeing a plot of scratch locations would be interesting.

I also noticed that Jefe was missing from the data for some reason.

We do have a few other active/unknown loose ends to clean up on the tracker.

[bmike-vt]

This is great work, seabiscuit.  Love the data-geekery.

bmike-vt : On every rider's individual map you can find tent icons for locations where they stopped for 4 hours or more.  It's not perfect (since SPOT data isn't perfect) but the data is there.  Seeing a plot of scratch locations would be interesting.

I also noticed that Jefe was missing from the data for some reason.

We do have a few other active/unknown loose ends to clean up on the tracker.

ScottM - thats what I've done... would be cool to see all sleep / rest stops on 1 map, instead of going to each rider.

[ScottM]

ScottM - thats what I've done... would be cool to see all sleep / rest stops on 1 map, instead of going to each rider.

Oh, right.  There would be a lot of them -- but when you drill down and if each was labeled (mouse over and by clicking) with the racer name, that would be a fun way to compare strategies and distances covered.

[bmike-vt]

Yup!
Trying to suss out the bivy spots of the fast boys and girls was part of my prep before I had to abandon my plans back in 12.

Someday though....