As someone who has done Louisville (2x), Florida, Maryland & Beach to Battleship, Maryland was my least favorite venue. But, you may not have much choice.

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Pink? Maybe. Maybe not. You decide.

Cozumel. Thank me later.

Yea I think this year you'll just need to register for what you can (unless you're willing to play a IM Foundation spot). I just bit the bullet and registered for IM Maryland after seeing how quickly other races have sold out. Better to be able to race at all then be left out. Also, just saw an option to Waitlist. That is new and might be worth a shot but I wouldn't expect spots to begin opening until summer.

This is also an opportunity to support your local sprint, olympic and half Ironman races. I believe Great Floridian Tri (Iron Distance) will be on next year too. So if you go outside Mdot you will have plenty of options if racing is happening and in many cases the chances of the local 50-500 person event happening is a lot higher anyway. Racing is racing.

Maryland is the last to fill up for a reason.

I whole heartedly agree and will be doing so. My buddy and I both were looking to also do an IM distance race in 2021.

Due to my own negligence I am just not that aware of many other IM distance races. I have no issue going outside of Mdot at all. I will check out the Great Floridian. If there are any others anyone knows of, I am all ears!

I figured that was the case. The jelly fish swim alone is a good reason to not fly to sign up list on that race.

Not sure why IM Maryland is getting so much hate. If you are looking for somewhere to have a vacation I wouldn't go there, but as far the race I can't complain. It's close to Baltimore and DC, Philadelphia is also quite close, river swim so don't need to worry about rough water (didn't see or hear anyone complain about jellyfish), flat bike course on good roads and a flat run course. If you are looking for a fast time, this is up there with the fastest IM courses.

I am not hating on IM Maryland as far as the course goes, yes it looks fast and I have heard the bike course roads are pretty sweet.

The jelly fish comment was from an athlete I know that did it a couple of years ago when they did it in the ocean and a massive school of jelly fish invaded the the swim. Something like over 1/2 the races had to bob and weave their way through the minefield of stingers.

I would also suspect that Ironman opens up some registrations in many events. Keep in mind if 30% of the field are new athletes, who now had to wait 2 years to race, many will just pass on the Ironman journey and move on to something else because of this pandemic. So I suspect, there are likely 10-20% more entries they can sell in every race once vaccines kick in and the economies pick up and there are less crowd gathering restrictions. In the mean time, they are going to want to play in conservative and have a lower number of participants just so they can get local approvals to run races in 2021. 1000 person race is easier to get approval vs 1500 which is easier than 2000. I bet there is a magic number around 1000 that allows them to run an event and not lose money. I have no idea many they need in each location to run a thin profit (its going to be variable based on local fixed costs), but each location will have different outdoor crowd gathering limits that Ironman will want to stay under until they get clearance for larger crowds, at which point they can maybe open up more entries.

So I would say, get ready for local racing and get in shape and opportunistically enter an Ironman if it is available. If you can get in shape for local half IM races, then you're not far away from IM fitness. From your half IM fitness if you can cram in a few 80-100km run weeks and a few 400km bike weeks (they can happen on different weeks), then you're set. You don't need a massive build if you already have Olympic to half IM fitness if you just want too do a full IM comfortably. If you want to Kona qualify, that's another story.

Keeping the participant number down at first is something I didn’t think about Davendish_paul. It makes complete sense. Just a bummer sitting around training hoping a race pops up in your time frame that you can jump into.

Hopefully once the vaccine is released and it actually does what we hope and is a quality deal not causing other health issues 2021 will be a race year far better than 2020.

Yes, my buddy is looking to just complete an IM comfortably. I would love to KQ but right now I just don’t have the time I would need to get to where I would need to be.