Triathlon, pt. 2

Swimming does matter, as I found out the hard way in my second triathlon. It was an Olympic-distance race and thus entailed completing a 1500m open-water swim, which I thoroughly bungled.
What you're looking at here is the result of a guy with a love of charts and too much time. This is a histogram showing the distribution of swim times for male participants in that triathlon I bungled. The horizontal axis signifies time in the water as measured in 1-minute buckets, and the vertical axis signifies the number of swimmers in each bucket. Note two things: (1) the chart's bars form a shape resembling a bell curve, as we'd expect, and (2) far, far on the right side of the chart one of the small bars is red. That's my bucket. It happens to be about two-and-a-half standard deviations below average and was good enough for 414th place out of 428 male participants.

That result was abysmal by my own low standards for swimming technique, and it motivated me to acquire a gym membership and learn how to swim for real. I used that membership too, for seven months and counting, and so I couldn't help but feel before participating in the Olympic-distance race I completed two weekends ago that I would swim comparatively well. I even had visions of keeping up with a middle-paced pack, a hope that was dashed when I failed to be in the water at the time of the starting whistle.

Two days afterwards I looked up my swim split online only to find out that my swim time ranked a mere 343rd out of all 404 male participants. That hardly seems like an improvement over 414th out 428, so I set about making another chart.
Rankings can be deceiving. There I am in the red bar again, and this time I'm a mere one standard deviation below average. That's still bad enough to be far away from staying up with a middle-paced pack, but I can take solace in being a part of the bell-shape part of a swim-time histogram for once.