Man that race brings back memories. I also did it in the late 80's, my partner and I were the first pros to ever do that race. Unfortunately for us, we had never raced in a canoe before, so even thought we got like 18th in that event, we lost too much time to hold on for the win. It was one of the most fun races I ever did, I hope you can find it out there somewhere...

Yeah, it just sort of disappeared. I think participant numbers kept dwindling and the directors had to pull the plug. It was a very fun event...did it as a 4 person team in 2004.

I recognize this is an old post, but I was just looking for info about the MN B2B Tri and found this thread. I too raced in 2004! I was on a two person coed team: Team 35 Cents Please. What was your team name?

Don’t know why it died, like many local races have. Wish it was still going.

I was surprised to see someone had bumped this thread! Our team name was Crusty Muffins, but I was way off on my previous post. We raced in 2001. Because it was before everyone posted pictures of everything on social media, I had to go back and look at our old photo albums to check the year!

Fun to find this forum and talk of B2B. We did it in 2001, right after NFL player Corey Stringer died due to heat. We actually won the event with 4 athletes, one being a rock star women triathlete! Most fun I ever had racing a triathlon even thru all 4 days. The canoe was beautiful but hellish as I canoed 36 miles, could barely hold my beer up afterward.

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someday I will put something funny here.

A lot of great triathlons in MN are gone. Waconia, Annandale HOLT, Lifetime and now Chisago to name a few. A lot of the others are not nearly as competitive as they once were. I suppose that is the way things are everywhere thanks to the rise in popularity of branded 70.3 races.

We won the two person masters division at the 19th annual in 2000 (Team DBI) and finished 2nd overall. Our kids crewed for us and had a great time working alongside the other team’s support crews as we crisscrossed MN from Lavern to Crane Lake making sure we were on the correct roads. B2B was a tremendous experience and becoming a voyeur which we still talk about and kickstarted my move from marathoning to triathlons which I am still doing 23 years later.

As I remember it lasted a few more years but became to expensive to manufacture and possibly hard to find a new race director.

Thanks for asking…the memories still make me proud when I think about my daughter seeing her dad doing hard things. Since then she has run multiple half’s and marathons and thinks a 5k is too short and a waste of time:-)

Chisago maybe not be done quite yet. They reopened talks with the city and a few days ago one of the race directors posted that they plan on opening up registration for the 2024 race soon.

Funny to see this thread pop back up, that race truly was one of the early classic underground events. Probably the most fun I ever had not racing for prize money too! I remember training for this thing, my partner(Time Sheeper) and I changed the entire way that it had been previously raced. Prior to us arriving, riders would do like 20 mile pulls back and forth, until the 440 miles of cycling was completed. I calculated the shortest distance one could ride, hop in the back of your sag wagon, and then get leapfrogged in time to do the flying start on the other end. That time was about 6 minutes, so we did roughly 3 mile pulls the entire 440 miles, talk about stress on your driver!!!

But we trained for that too, and then also did the same thing in the double marathon. Started with mile runs, then at some point 1/2 miles, and at the end when we were head to head with a much better running team, did 1/4's to the finish. They could not believe what we were doing, but we both did about a 2;30 marathon each and took the days lead into the canoe...