He doesn't look that much bigger...

Wow - the first two charts I looked at indicated anything over 60 is excellent...

BMI (for whatever it is worth) is around 23 at those numbers you gave. On the higher end of normal, so no waif.

It will be interesting to see him on a hard bike course.
In Rio I expect him and the Brownlees to go hard on the bike to soften the others.

As far as I know his training is in line with a lot of endurance training in Norway, similar to xc-skiers.

Not sure if that is a nice reference to give considering that at least two of the top names are dopers (Johaug, Sundby) and many seem to have TUE's...

He's definitely lost a lot of weight compared to a couple years ago, clearly with an eye to fixing his weakness, which was running. But to go from an uber-biker who would tend to immediately struggle in the run, to what he did in Yokohama is, well, pretty unbelievable.

Not sure if that is a nice reference to give considering that at least two of the top names are dopers (Johaug, Sundby) and many seem to have TUE's...

Really?

https://scientifictriathlon.com/tts154/

So you give all Russians the benifit of the doubt?

Hey that is an unfair association. I think Halvard was just pointing to his training to be similar to XC skiers. It's not Blummenfelt's fault that some athletes from his country got busted for doping. No one should be painted with the doping brush just because of countrymen/women who got busted. This athlete is pretty amazing and he's still so young. Lots of room to keep getting better. Everyone should be scared of him.

Thanks for posting that link. Very interesting that they swim 35,000-45,000 meters/week. That's a lot of swimming espec when combined with up to 400 km/wk on the bike and up to 120 km/wk on the run. Also of interest is that they'll do sets like 3 x 1500 m at same intensity.

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"Anyone can be who they want to be IF they have the HUNGER and the DRIVE."

For these guys 40000m is just a bit over 11 hours. Let's assume a 25 hour training week, and that they generally run 14-15 kph jogging, so the 120km is only 8 more hours. So now we're up to only 19 hours. We'll also assume that they probably are trianing more like 30 hours than 25 hours, so that's another 11 hours for riding.

The "smart" thing about doing more swimming is that they can actually jack up the highest possible cardio load with less of a recovery penalty vs running. I bet their average cardio is much higher on their steady swims and certainly on their interval swims than the miniscule amount of intensity they can do running. Sure on biking they can do a lot of intensity and when you go hard on the bike you can go really hard, but the other 80 percent of the time riding the intensity is waaaaaay lower than low intensity swimming.

So you can see how the swim heavy program accrues way more cardio adaptation than either bike or run and they are doing sufficient bike and run to do really well at those legs (yes, I am sold on the swim volume being much higher intensity than you can do in the other sports).