Field notes 5 MIN READ
Three sports, one sheet
A triathlon is three recordings, not one, and how you combine them decides whether the print is a day or a filing cabinet.
An Ironman is one day and three files. The print has to decide whether it is showing a day or a set of results.
Bring all three
Export the swim, the bike and the run and bring them at once. They are drawn together, in one frame, at one scale.
The scale is the interesting part. At a common scale the bike dominates: 180 km of riding next to 42 km of running next to 3.8 km of swimming. The swim is a small mark in the corner.
That is not a flaw to correct. It is the proportions of the day, and correcting it — scaling each leg to fill its own box — would produce three drawings that happen to be on the same paper rather than one drawing of a race.
The swim is the best-looking leg
It is also the one people leave off, because it is small.
An open-water swim course is a shape that no infrastructure produced: a triangle or a rectangle marked by buoys, swum by somebody who could not see them very well. The line wanders in a way that a road-bound leg never does, and it is instantly readable as swimming.
Leave it out and the print is a bike ride with a run attached.
Transitions
If the watch ran continuously, T1 and T2 appear as short dense scribbles between the legs — the record of somebody moving quickly in a small area while confused.
Some people find this the best detail on the print. Others stop the watch and get clean gaps instead. Both are honest; only one is funny.
Which time
The total. An Ironman is one continuous effort and the finish time is the number the day produced.
Splits can go in the subtitle if they matter, but a row of three times under the line turns a record into a results table, and the results table already exists somewhere else.
Size
70×100 if the swim is included. The bike leg sets the frame, and at 50×70 the swim becomes too small to read as a shape.
Questions people actually ask
- Can the three legs go on one print?
- Yes. Bring all three files and they are drawn together in one frame, sharing a scale. The swim is small and the bike is large, which is accurate.
- Should the swim be included even though it is short?
- Yes. It is a fraction of the distance and it is the leg with the most distinctive shape — an open-water course is a line no road network could produce.
- Which time do I print?
- The total. The individual splits belong in the subtitle if anywhere, because the day was one continuous thing.
- Do transitions show?
- As small gaps, if the watch was stopped. If it ran continuously, the transitions appear as short dense scribbles between legs, which is exactly what they were.
YOURS, FROM A FILE, IN 90 SECONDS
One effort. One sheet of paper.
Bring the file and every choice is yours: treatment, colour, which numbers come along. Museum-grade 250 gsm matte, printed in Denmark, shipped in a tube with a nail taped inside.
Print it. FROM 349 kr