With advent of MTR being added my guess is that both usa and Canada will have more of these type of events that really can showcase that raw speed necessary for 18 min race.

But it's not IM!! :)

18 to 20 minutes right at the limit pushes so many key physiological buttons! So few athletes and coaches these days seem to understand this!

Was cool to see the top Canadian elites showing up to get after their national championship. I was super impressed overall by Canadian athletes technical skills. They were easily 4-6s faster in transitions than American athletes overall from what I watched with each race.

Thanks, Brooks.

Call it the Simon Whitfield Factor - for some time now we've actually taken seriously the fact that there is other racing and formats in triathlon. It's helped that Simon is an icon not just in triathlon in Canada, but everywhere in Canada!

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Steve Fleck @stevefleck | Blog

Usually elite courses overlap, but to run that type of set up with heats 10min apart, you have to treat it like an age group race, where the standard is the cloverleaf layout (non-overlapping swim, bike and run courses (to avoid last biker first runner, or first biker last swimmer scenarios (Florida famously had one of those which ended Hunter Kemper's olympic bid (can't remember if it was clermont or sarasota)). and the Split T1 and T 2 zones was a great solution to avoid what could otherwise have been chaos (when you figure that 200 elites went through in qualifying, and there were next to no transition penalties). And the flip flopping of the courses was a first for an ITU event with heats and finals, but it was great to mix up the challenges and to add the technical aspect to the bike for the finals and to add some intrigue for spectators.

With an agenda as packed for the weekend as it was, that set-up was a necessity to fit everything in, but it was pretty impressive to see how smoothly it ran despite running 8 elite races with 200 athletes total in just over 2hours...