Kailua-Kona, Hawaii — Just settled into a writing class at Portland State University, Evan Roshak noticed a classmate wearing shorts on a frigid winter day with a distinctive red tattoo on his right ankle.
“Are you Iron Man?” Roshak asked his classmate Will Watson.
yes. In fact, Watson got the tattoo after qualifying for this year’s Ironman World Championships in Hawaii. Roshak also had Ironman aspirations, so he began training with Watson and eventually qualified this summer.
The two students from Oregon are part of an unusually large undergraduate student base coming here to compete in the pinnacle of triathlon. From Clemson to Dartmouth, Loyola Chicago to the University of Utah, at least a dozen boys and girls from NCAA schools skip classes for up to a week, do midterms and reports, and compete in what triathletes simply call Kona.
These surges can be partially explained by the coronavirus pandemic. Because these athletes are very competitive in nature, embracing long runs, indoor and outdoor bike rides, and endless pool laps to prevent isolation and set new goals.
But more broadly, triathlon is gaining traction among young athletes. More than 40 NCAA schools offer women’s triathlon as a national sport, compared to just a handful less than a decade ago. The newest school is the University of Arizona. Also, college athletes are now free to make money from prestige deals (known as name, image, and likeness trading), making it difficult for them to compete in extreme sports like triathlon. , has become more economically viable.
No wonder Ironman, in an attempt to garner interest among college sports fans, announced in July 2023 that the 70.3-mile race, ending at the 50-yard line at Beaver Stadium at Pennsylvania State University, would be held at State College, Pennsylvania. not. .
“The conventional sense is that these races are not something you do when you are young and your body is still developing. game,” said Roshak. 22 years old, history major. “But I think there’s a new understanding of what young people can do.”
The total Ironman distance is 140.6 miles (2.4 miles swim, 112 miles bike, 26.2 miles run) and must be completed within 17 hours. That’s more than twice as many for his Olympic triathlon swim legs and more than four times his for bike and run legs.
Kona is actually the second championship to be held in 2022. His 2021 edition of the race, postponed by the pandemic, took place in May in St. George, Utah. It is the first time the championship has been held outside of Hawaii. The 2020 race has been cancelled.
To announce Ironman’s return to Hawaii, owned by Advance Publications: Chris Nikic, the first Down syndrome patient to complete Ironman, and former Belgian professional basketball player who nearly lost a leg in Brussels in 2016. We invited Sebastien Bellin. Terrorist attacks, among others, competing.
With 82 professional triathletes competing for the $125,000 first prize, this year’s race was the first time the men’s and women’s races were held on separate days since the inaugural Hawaiian Ironman Triathlon in 1978 .
In the upset, former UC Berkeley All-American runner Chelsea Sodalo of Mill Valley, Calif. won Thursday’s women’s race in 8:33:46. Reigning champion Daniela Ryf of Switzerland finished eighth, half an hour behind Sodalo.
The men’s race started at dawn on Saturday and the leaders were due to finish by mid-afternoon. Defending champion and Olympic gold medalist Christian Blumenfeld of Norway was the outrageous favorite. But one of his sentimental picks was 2019 runner-up Tim O’Donnell. He was competing in his first race since March 2021, when he lost his life to a heart attack mid-race.
More than 5,000 people are registered in Kona, nearly half of them from Europe. Also, the average contestant age was he was 45, but from 18 he was 24, with about 100 (a good number) participating from the youngest age group.
Since 2011, there has been a 68% increase in the number of women aged 18-24 enrolling in Kona and a 56% increase in the number of men.
“There’s some magic here,” said 19-year-old Sarah Sawaya, a sophomore at the University of Mississippi, the youngest American to participate. “I am very happy to have experienced it.”
Most American college students competed in either swimming or cross-country in high school. Some, like Sawaya, have parents and siblings who have run marathons and triathlons.
Both were experienced skiers in Oregon (Slopestyle) and Utah (Big Mountain). Another said he played high school golf outside of Chicago for four years.
One common theme, however, was that the Norwegian’s success in long-distance running had a fascination with pushing the limits of endurance at a young age.
“The Norwegians rule,” Roshak said. “They’re young and they’re rewriting the rulebook in terms of what your body should be like.”
Peyton Thompson, 20, the youngest male qualifier, said he was surprised by the Norwegian obsession with data analysis, science and nutrition.
Thompson was once a promising point guard in North Florida, playing for the top youth basketball team. However, after sustaining a serious injury to his knee, he gave up his dream of playing college hoops and enrolled at Duke University as a doctor of medicine.
Then came the pandemic. And while taking online classes and living on campus, he couldn’t get into many of the clubs he originally wanted.
“I had to learn how to swim,” said Thompson, a neuroscience major.
Thompson is one of three Ironman students in the Research Triangle. A native of Redondo Beach, California, Andrew Buchanan is in his senior year at the University of North Carolina. Corinne Mouw is from Pittsgrove, New Jersey, is in her senior year in North Carolina, and is active in her school’s triathlon club.
A classmate was sent home in March 2020 due to the pandemic, but she stayed in Raleigh and worked for a cooperative, part of a mechanical engineering major. But everyone stayed connected through Strava, an online exercise tracking tool.
“I couldn’t see my friends, but I could see them working out,” she said.
The cost of competing is very high, Roshak estimates, easily reaching $15,000 a year for coaches, bikes, land and water suits, and race registration fees. Corporate sponsorships can help cover costs through discounts on clothing and equipment, but many triathletes rely on their families and work part-time.
Frasier Williamson, 24, of Kaysville, Utah, won a cross-country scholarship at Weber State University and has always struggled financially.
After a two-year Mormon mission to the Philippines, Williamson, now a junior, was in shape training with his college teammates. However, he learns he will not receive the scholarship because the athletic department has tightened spending during the pandemic.
“Either you take a full-time job to go to college and then another full-time job to pay for college, or you read the writing on the wall and try something else,” he said. said.
Jordan Ambrose, 20, almost committed to swimming as a sprinter at Mackendry University in Illinois. But after she was diagnosed with thoracic outlet syndrome, she quit swimming and enrolled at Southern Indiana University near her home in Mount Vernon, Indiana.
Desperate to stay active during the pandemic, she started training for a marathon with her cousin. Triathlon first emerged as her option when she realized she could swim long distances without pain.
After she completed her first triathlon, Ambrose was approached by Trine University in northeastern Indiana, who will win the NCAA Division III triathlon title in 2021.
Ambrose was intrigued, but declined because he wanted to join the Southern Indiana swim team in his debut season.
“From now on, I’m going to focus on swimming,” she said after finishing the Ironman in 13:12:09. “I love the team, the competitive atmosphere, everything.”
Trine is one of 14 NCAA Division III schools participating in the Sprint Triathlon this fall. The race includes a 750m swim, a 20km bike and a 5km run. There are 15 schools participating in Division II and 12 schools in Division I, with Arizona State University taking the lead with five consecutive national titles. Over 300 women from 24 countries are registered.
By 2024, triathlon could become the official championship sport of the NCAA. The USA Triathlon Foundation is funded by donors and through trades of names, images and likenesses to promote the sport on social media, said Tim Yount, chief sports development officer of USA Triathlon. We plan to set up a consortium to pay triathletes.
There was a moment during Thursday’s Ironman race in the hot, muggy conditions that Mississippi student Sawaya felt she couldn’t continue. Subjected to the heavy crosswinds of her big island, she reeled on her bike. Her feet were covered with blisters.
“During the run, I fell asleep,” added Sawaya, a sophomore in biomedical engineering.
But thanks to the volunteers lining the course in canary T-shirts and befriending other triathletes, she kept going. At dawn, a man who ran beside her for 10 miles told her he had a daughter her age.
So when she finished in 15:34:19, the drizzle had her arms up and beaming.it was 10:19pm
“So many stories,” she said. “All the pain, all the pain – it was worth it.”
However, I had little time to rest as I had to prepare for an online organic chemistry exam at 9am.