Before anyone says I'm "insane" let me just say I'm just throwing this out there as an idea that is somewhat inspired by Dan's article from a few months ago "The Search for Different" and my recently acquired love of mountain biking. An obvious caveat to this proposal would be that it would have to be *way* less technical than what's shown below for a typical triathlete to survive. Maybe swim (invariably cold), run, lift, bike, run? If you did a time trial start between the swim and the first run I would think the field would thin out enough to the point where lift access wouldn't be a bottleneck, lift transit time would be the same for everyone.


One location that comes to mind is Frisco CO. You could swim in the Dillon Reservoir (which gets up to the mid 50s in August... wetsuit mandatory), run to Keystone from the northeast corner of the reservoir (about 3.5 miles), take a gondola up to the top, hop on bike that's staged up there, ride one of the easy routes down, dismount, and then run maybe a ~2-3 mile course.

In terms of that initial bike start on snow, I doubt you'd have any in August but looking at the ski runs perhaps you could use a snow maker to cover a ~ 500 yard section of ski run leading to the start of the bike course. I'm seeing a cost of running said machine at $1,000/acre for 12" of snow so perhaps less for less snow. I'm guessing about 5 acres based on a quick Google Earth measurement. Exorbitant for sure but I'm sure you could charge a bit of a premium for such a unique race, no?

Thoughts?