As a longtime member of HTC (I joined in 2015, barely able to swim!), Dan has asked me to summarize my experience in Kona for the benefit of our fellow club members. Perhaps some people are just starting their triathlon journey now and want to know what Kona is all about; maybe others have read “Ironwar” and dream one day of travelling to the Big Island to take part in this iconic race; or maybe others couldn’t be less interested in long distance triathlon and Ironman, but just enjoy reading race reports! Whomever you are, this race report is for you!
Prologue – the qualification
I originally qualified for Kona at Ironman Bolton in July 2021. I actually never set out in my triathlon journey dreaming of Hawaii or having grand ambitions to qualify for World Championships, I just wanted to be healthy and feel great. However over the years I sort of did a lot of the major races in Europe (from various Olympic distances in the UK to European 70.3s including the 70.3 World Championship in Nice in 2019, as well as a few of the long distance ones like Ironman South Africa, Challenge Roth and the ETU Championships in Madrid in 2018). As my results got better and better, I started looking at my run times, power numbers and Best Bike Splits predictions and concluded that there was a chance that I’d qualify at some point, in which case I’d definitely want to take the Kona slot. As plans go, this happened fairly quickly in Bolton (an epic race which no longer exists, but that’s for a different race report), and that is where things got interesting.
The main problem is that after paying the cool 1,000 dollars in July 2021, the race got cancelled in September due to Covid (by then Hawaii was still sceptical of visitors), at which point I was offered the option of going to Kona in 2022, 23 or 24. Having meanwhile also qualified to race 70.3 Worlds in St George in 2022, I decided to defer Kona to 2023 which – lucky me – eventually got cancelled AGAIN due to Ironman’s greedy decision to have a 2-day Kona race in 2022, which for reasons that will become clear below, was never going to work. At that point, not caring about the whole Kona thing so much at the beginning, I qualified again at Ironman Italy in 2022 and became quite obsessed with the idea of going given so much misfortune. The mere thought that things were get challenging got me even more interested!
The journey – all grey clouds have a silver lining
In the end, the momentous date of 18 October 2024 arrived and we set off for the airport! The postponement of the race had a positive side effect – the 2024 edition was to be held two weeks later than usual (traditionally the second weekend of October), which meant that race day fell bang in the middle of UK half term. Hooraayy! My race journey could become the proper family holiday of a lifetime for my two kids (14 and 11-year old), and my wife. That required a lot more planning of course, as that also meant the stay would be longer and I would need to find activities for everybody to enjoy. As it turns out, there is plenty to do, the trip was indeed incredible, planning it all happily filled the year-long wait for race day (AirBnbs and hotels tend to get very booked up very early on, so one really needs to move a year in advance). That said as I started racking up all the various reservations and race plans, a frightening truth started to take shape – Hawaii is very expensive, even more than mainland USA, and as a result I was also building up to the credit card bill of a lifetime! But let’s not spoil what is otherwise a fun read….
The journey, especially with kids, was simply overwhelming as it involved a 9am flight to San Francisco, with the associated 6am wake up for the whole family, then a 6-hour wait for a United flight to Kona, so that by the time we rented our car and arrived at our flat on Alii Drive we had been on the road, practically sleepless, for about 28 hours. I was going to need the whole 7 days to race day to recover and acclimatize.
The word “acclimatize” brings me to the next point. Preparing for an Ironman is hard enough by itself, as you obviously need to put in the hours to prepare the body for a long, sustained effort. The stress here is amplified as you know you are going to compete against the best triathletes in the world so, even if inadvertently, you end up trying to really do a good job in all the sessions in the months prior. In addition my coach Dan Plews, who once won Kona in 2018 as an ager grouper and still holds the age group course record, has a special way to prepare Kona-bound athletes through a fairly sustained period of sauna sessions at the end of your training day, where you are supposed to linger in a sauna for 20-30 minutes (often a very uncomfortable experience, which occasionally turned me into a zombie for the following few hours). If you put it all up together, along with packing and the various last minute todos, it is very common to also be racking up a lot of fatigue besides big credit card bills. And the punchline is clear: if you expected to recover the week before the race in Kona, you won’t!
As you disembark the plane and make your way towards the open air terminal and smiling ground personnel handing out flower leis to arriving passengers, you realize you have just entered a huge, very warm wind tunnel, with 98% humidity at all hours and temperatures rarely much below 30 degree Celsius even at night. If you ever plan to go, DO NOT plan to arrive there on the Tuesday or Wednesday before the race as it is simply not enough time to get used to the weather; the scientific evidence discussed in my coach’s online heat preparation course (which I highly recommend for anybody wanting to do well in hot races, not just Kona), clearly shows that you can condition very well for the heat at home, you then lose very little conditioning if you stop saunas a few days before flying out (about 2.5%/day), but you then still need 5 full days on site. This obviously makes the logistics of doing this race even more complicated but, in my view, anything shorter than that is likely to turn race day into a really unhappy death march – this is not a race where you just “aim to get around” – you have to survive the conditions, and you better be at your best even if you want to just finish!
The week in Kona pre-race
Again I felt I was very well prepared for the week prior to the race as I had had countless discussions with my coach and also heeded the advice contained in one of the better podcast episodes by my old coach Matt Dixon at Purple Patch. The suggestions can be summarized in one simple sentence: “STAY OUT OF THE SUN!”. The first 2-3 days you will feel your head spinning due to the tropical conditions and the 11-time zones of difference; so any training is best done first thing in the morning before the weather gets really REALLY hot. You should have no regrets about sleeping with air conditioning on, and when you start riding and running, you should really not look at your watch as all of your heart rate and power numbers are likely to be all over the place for a while.
Of course not many people got the memo! Our beautiful seafront AirBnB was on Alii drive, which is the stage of the first part of the marathon and where most of the eventual race participants tend to train. That gave you a frontline seat to all the training that others were doing, which elicited several reactions that are worth sharing:
- Kona is very small. It’s a fishing village. As race day nears, the streets become progressively busier and traffic-logged. Triathletes end up running on both sides of Alii Drive, which has a 1-meter wide cycle lane on both sides.Some people run up, others down, others cycle in both directions even though the athlete guide tells you to avoid Alii drive, etc. It all quickly becomes a mess and I can empathize with locals that get frustrated during race week. I can’t imagine the genius at ironman who decided that it would be a good idea to hold two races the same week, each with the same number of participants.
- People are very fit. My first reaction was to define the event as a “freak convention for ripped people”. On Alii Drive, there seemed to be a constant stream of perfectly chiselled bodies all running shirtless, wearing nothing more than a pair of tiny shorts and a heart rate monitor. Why don’t people wear T-shirts? I have no idea, I think my explanation is that given how much you sweat that allows you to not have to wash shirts constantly at home. But I guess a lot of the guys clearly like to show their six packs and their elaborate tattoos and body art (again not sure why it is such a thing). The girlfriends and wives, all looking like they just walked off a page from Sports Illustrated, also like to display their latest Lululemon kits and their bouncy strides, and to top it all off, a lot of people simply could not care less about temperatures and actually chose to train in the maximum heat of the day. Go figure.
- People are very, very fit! As your stay grows on you, you realize that you have no choice other than trying to fit in! Swimming at the Kona Pier, where Ironman provides bag check every day staffed by volunteers and free Mortal Hydration products, really opened my eyes. Every morning I took to the water a little tentatively, mainly looking to dodge jellyfish, and could not avoid noticing the hundreds of other swimmers overtaking me with perfect swimming-instructor like strokes, effortlessly gliding through the turquoise waters at double my speed while I was simply trying not to swallow huge gulps of extremely saline water. I decided that to simply be in this crowd was a privilege, and that in the end I actually belonged. Generally race prep wasn’t helped by the fact that for the Ho-ala training swim the prior Sunday there weren’t y many buoys out, one of my goggles was leaking, and the swells made sighting near impossible, so after swimming the course in 1h 25m my confidence was more flat than my rear wheel after a ride in Hertfordshire in November.
- Cycle training in Kona sucks. It really does. The Queen Ka’ahumanu highway, which provides the backdrop for so many of the iconic images on race day, is just like a M1-type motorway where you have to simply ride on the emergency lane, and are constantly overtaken by huge cars (all American cars are huge!) passing you at close distance, at full speed, and displacing a lot of air. Nothing like the beautiful, lonely climbs through French villages before last years’ Worlds in Nice. Coming back home in one piece is success.
- In a way, while I had never been here it constantly felt like coming back to my real home! Everything felt so familiar, walking around I saw all the mythical places I heard about on podcasts and saw on online videos: Alii Drive, the Kona Pier, Huggo on the Rocks where Bob Babbit films his “Breakfast by Bob” program, Lava Java, the café where all the famous athletes and coaches meet (all incredibly friendly and willing to pose for pictures with Kona qualifiers), Palani which is the hill right after transition that you do both on bike and on run, and the stage for so many high level blowups over the years!
- Maybe it’s the sun that clouds thinking, but Hawaiians see spirituality everywhere. Hawaiians believe that the Big Island has life, gods like Madam Pele inhabit it, cause volcanic eruptions, and take revenge against people not treating the island well – apparently every year the local post office receives hundreds of pieces of lava rocks in the mail from tourists who have decided to return the rocks after being hit by unspeakable misfortunes on their return home. Whether you believe it or not, many triathletes clearly do as most famously Mark Allen was able to win his first Kona after hiring a Shaman and making peace with Madam Pele, and this year Patrick Lange spread out the petals and leaves of his world championship crown before leaving as “the gods don’t want anything to leave the island”. In my view the explanation for triathletes is more prosaic: it is just so easy for anybody to overheat if they try a bit too hard on race day, so that even for pros race day is completely unpredictable and overall fitness is not a good proxy for race results (Alistair Brownlee famously ended up walking the marathon in 2018).
At any rate, race week came and went pretty quickly. In reality I didn’t quite rest much as we had a full plan of activities with the kids – I thought only a loser would take his family to Hawaii to then lock them in a room with AC due to a race. We did a lot: coffee plantation visits, we saw turtles, dolphins, Hawaiian religious sites, we snorkelled near Captain Cook monument, we attended a Luau ceremony, had a lot of Poke’! In short, the Big Island was indeed all that it promised to be. I only took Friday off and didn’t attend any of the banquets, briefing or Ironman talks (literally in the tens, had no time to listen to trainer and helmet adverts), other than a meetup of all the EndureIq athletes as my squad had 28 qualifiers – amazing, so many smart people. YOLO, I thought, and given the low likelihood of winning my AG group, I had decided this was going to be the family trip of a lifetime, which in the end it was.
Race day
The race itself was actually a lot like any other race! The main difference was the celebratory atmosphere both at racking on Friday and on race morning for what is called the “body-marking ceremony” (it’s a Kona thing, they just check you tattooed your number on your arms don’t ask me why). That is when all the volunteers, lined on the two sides of the piers, welcome you with a standing ovation and cries of congratulations, high fives and shouts of “well done”. Not sure why but that was really the only moment of the entire trip where I started grinning from ear to ear and felt a lump in my throat. In the end Ironman is a journey, every step needs to be celebrated, and just being there should be source of lifelong joy and sense of achievement, I thought. Pity those who reduce this whole beautiful sport to a set of FTP numbers and heart rates and are always quick to judge their performances – life, and ironman races, is best lived in the moment!
The swim
The swim is in waves, so you are corralled with your age group and are called to descend the iconic steps of Dig Me beach with your peers at the allotted times. That is really a moment I will remember for the rest of my life – the sun rising, the Hawaian conch shell is blown, the US national anthem is sung. I learnt that the chain of gyms “DigMe Fitness” is after all named after this microscopic beach (it must be 10 meter-wide, less at high tide) in honour of the special energy and sense of accomplishment you feel on the eponymous beach at race start. It is all true. That brief moment of elation is then followed by swimming around 100 meters to the start line where volunteers on surf boards swim back and forth to create an imaginary start line, until the gun goes.
The swim went more or less as I expected, I always know the day will be long and I will never be first out of the water, so I just focused on keeping effort steady and my stroke smooth, occasionally looking for a pair of feet. I didn’t check my time as usual, I later learnt I swam 1’10, which was typical and fine. Only notable thing to report was the sight of a dolphin pod swimming just under me at some point, which was one of the main pictures I’ll take with me from the experience – ain’t no dolphins in the Hampstead ponds, that much I am sure!
The bike
My coach Dan typically assigns me rather suicidal race power targets as, like me, he’s a competitive guy and believes that in important races you might as well go for broke as finishing 10th or 100th is in the end the same thing. Interestingly, he took pains to be extremely cautious here reminding me to keep HR under 140 on the bike, power under 200W, effort steady, pedal very little on initial descent after Palani to allow the heart rate to settle, and generally focus on hydrating and eating often. Indeed race dynamic was crazy as with so much testosterone flying around and so much buildup to race day, most guys simply could not help but floor it in the first 40K, especially as the wind is manageable and the surface of the Queen K feels as smooth as velvet (especially if you are coming from the UK..). It was very easy to keep 40KPH average and above in the first hour or two, even with limited effort. But that is when things got interesting! As you make your way along the coastline past the airport and around the big Mauna Kea volcano that dominates the island, winds start to pick up. Then the gentle climb to Hawi starts, with the wind by now blowing in huge gusts and making it a lot harder to keep power steady. At the half point turnaround in Hawi, you start to look forward to the descent, but then as it turns out there is little to look forward to as the winds force you to continue to pedal and it becomes a big challenge to even stay upright – I had a couple of close calls with my handlebars close to turning sideways at over 60kph. Which means you finally welcome flat road again with some relief, assuming the return to Kona on the Queen K will be as easy as on the way out – except that it isn’t! By now the wind has turned so all of a sudden it becomes a long hard slog to even to go up gentle inclines. You start seeing all these obviously megafit triathletes sporting the latest bikes and the most advanced 3D-printed extensions having blown up completely, which I felt good about: payback for all the times I had been overtaken in the first 40K! That said, as the temperatures had by now risen a lot (Garmin says max was 34), I started to struggle too and I finally started to realize this was going to be a long day. The other thing, at this point many people were desperate so I saw huge, unavoidable draft packs, which wasn’t a lot of fun as with age groups starting together at different times, it was actually very hard to tell which of the top contenders was having a clean race and which ones didn’t. That is just not OK for a world championships, and part of the reason why I think Nice is a better race.
The run
Once again Dan had recommended that I take it VERY easy on the run, targeting a 4’40 min/km pace which is basically a jog in the park for me. I actually questioned him hard prior to race day on that as I thought I could run a 3h marathon being by now fully acclimatized to hot weather and in the best shape of my life. He responded by demonstrating how you grab ice at water stations and you stick it in your tri suit and under your hat. He also told me to not push on the various gentle uphill sections on the first 10K in town on Alii Drive as I would be allowed to accelerate only after exiting the Energy Lab after 30K. I dismissed his suggestions as the delusions of an aging man, but still chose to follow his guidance in the first 2-3K in recognition of the fact that I pay him every month!
Once again, Dan was right and I was wrong as even on Alii Drive, which was lined with screaming fans, the conservative 4’40 pace quickly started feeling ambitious. Ouch. I had no idea what was going on as I hadn’t really been killing myself in the first few hours, but in hindsight it’s pretty clear that by then my body had heated up quite a bit and of course all my thresholds had changed. 5 min/km felt like 4, and somebody appeared to have put my reality in slow motion. I was very glad to see my wife and kids at an aid station after 6K (they decided to volunteer, which they enjoyed very much) but by the time I climbed Palani and faced the second 10Ks going up the Queen K my mind harked back to racking and the fact that in the end the essence of Ironman is always a race for survival, against yourself. So I resolved not to look at my watch again and simply enjoyed the progressively slowing pace and climbing perception of effort. At some point on the Queen K I found myself walking, but then water, coke, ice made the trick and here I was back up running. Even the much feared Energy Lab, where you take a left turn and enter a 6-7K downhill/uphill section amidst lava fields, which most people define as some sort sold of Stranger-Things-esque “Upside Down” universe from where no person emerges the same, had little psychological impact on me as by then I had realized my competitive race was sort of over. On the way there I also saw Patrick Lange on the opposite lane coming back into town, escorted by three camera motorcycles and followed by a helicopter above, running with his characteristic upright style, effortlessly holding a sub-4 min/km pace, and told to myself “you are witnessing history being made!”. Indeed once again the older guy (he is 38) who swam and biked conservatively was going to outrun all the young guns like Sam Laidlow who, I later learnt, was reduced to a mess like several of the other pros, staggering through aid stations on the Queen K. This is an unforgiving race and even people who would generally be able to predict their finish time in an Ironman to the nearest minute know that Kona is a lottery – I now understand why.
The last few KMs were painful but also pure elation, I knew my race had been slower than I had planned, but I also thought this moment was likely going to be the pinnacle of my triathlon career so was worth celebrating. I turned my hat around, took a right turn on Alii drive and then high fived most people. The time, a little over 10 hours was disappointing, but I carried absolutely no negativity with me – I had done everything in my power, and I was going to be a Kona finisher for the rest of my life!
The recovery & next steps.
We spent the week after the race in Waikoloa, where plenty of people saw my fading race tattoos and continued to stop me to congratulate and ask how it went – there is indeed a LOT of passion and love for triathlon on the island besides the very small vocal minority of residents who don’t like the yearly Ironman invasion (hard to blame them). At this stage I don’t want to think about my next race, whether I want to come back etc. it is all just too early and in a way a bit pointless. I am clearly keen to go back to the World Championship in Nice given how much I love the area and how easy it is to get to from London. Beyond that, as I spent the second Hawaiian week surrounded by turtles, colourful fish, immense manta rays, hundreds of unfamiliar flowers and fruits while admiring the ongoing volcanic activity at the National Park (the big island has 5 volcanos, and they are the most active in the world), I kept pondering whether the Hawaiians and some of the best triathletes of all times are right in believing that the Big Island is inhabited by gods and spirits that you need to ingratiate. Surrounded by so much life, beauty and powerful natural energy, how can I be so sure they are wrong?
To the next time! Mahalo, Hawaii! You were everything you promised to be, and more!
