Your kidding right? Where there’s a road or parking lot there is a way. They’re all over the place! Too far to run? You just swam 2 miles and will bike 112 followed by a 26 run and you’re complaining we might have to run an extra 800m in transition? Might upset the locals? More than shutting down the entire highway? You’re not spelling it out exact for me. Because I’m obligated to give you a precise solution when the immediate engrained response is to negate regardless?
When dealing with the city council (and reality), it’s probably quite a bit more nuanced than your caveman approach of just using any paved surface.
And yet they get permission to use 100 miles of that paved surface.
When dealing we with a city council you start with $$$$.
You demonstrate the added value of $$$$$$$ over the next decade. How often in a city budget meeting, just by making a few small adjustments over a 24 hour period can you double revenue?
Think there are that many easy switches to flip to drastically increase revenue by a billion? (10 years, 100 million, according to one tourism impact).
I propose the community do like the local community did in Green Bay this weekend with hosting the NFL draft.
Every local neighborhood was selling parking spaces on every inch of real estate they could.
Every business / homeowner in Kona can just bid out their piece of property, the hell with rules, the hell with fairness. It’s all about capitalism BABY!!!
You will be ok in Spain as an American and as a tourist. If you are travelling on a US passport they need a warrant to search your phone on returning to the US. Follow the advice and remove face recognition. It is just people travelling on Visa’s/Green Cards where they have a right to seize your electronic devices.
Um, ya. If you want to be a purist, go pickup a stick, find a ball and a field and some friends and have fun. Make sure that field isn’t owned by a developer first though.
Meanwhile everyone else flying to a resort in the middle of the ocean will get back to looking at their portfolio while you complain about how much farther someone runs in transition.
Purist? lol no dude want to be realistic.
That was T2 which was at the Kona Surf hotel in Keauhou. That does not solve the issue.[quote=“Bryancd, post:306, topic:849412, full:true”]
I’m old enough to remember my Mom doing the race and Transition was over in Keauhou. Not sure returning to “The Pit” would provide more space but maybe it could help space out the bikes leaving T1 better.
[/quote]
Clear the rocks and change the swim exit. Athletes can line up and enter from the pier. Bike start stays the same. The entire concrete path and one car lane could be lined with transition bikes and you still have enough room to keep the finish in the same spot. As an option.
1 Like
I think that was 2001, not 2011. It is an easy transition . . . you just exit on the beach side like in the practice swim and take that grey path right back to the tennis courts/parking area . . . pretty easy to do, and shorter than running around the pier. You still can’t spread out 5000 people on the bike course unless there are many more waves that go 'til later in the morning.
If hotel guests knew in advance that the parking lot was somewhere else, and there was a series of shuttles taking them there, and absolutely no one was taking a room unaware they can figure out themselves if they want to stay there or not; I agree the carpark was fairly full last year, but not that full as a big chunk of it was used for the banquet for at least some of the period, I never had an issue getting a park there in the days before the race as I had a parking pass.
Some of the ppl I know staying there didn’t have cars specifically because it’s a s**tshow renting cars in Kona, and one of the benefits of that hotel is that you can get by without one; ramping up more shuttles to the airport, buses etc and it is painful with a walk uphill, but doable with enough shuttles. A deal with all the usual places where people park cars race day now (I think Costco is one, there are a bunch of other strip malls etc nearby) and again, painful but doable; other race locations in the world have to do this sort of stuff too.
Race day you can’t drive in or out anyhow, so that day is a non issue. So it’s extending that to 2 days. The parking lot is big enough to still have some cars in there, just not full. And with a valet system you could jam in 2-3X more cars as we do in Asia double triple parking etc throwing staff at it, again…painful but possible.
The bigger issue is whether the island can handle that number of guests; however a lot of people are there husband and wife where one isn’t able to race currently, so maybe it isn’t a 2X more people issue. Of the locals I spoke to (non representative sample obviously but seems to be the vibe of many posting in this thread) they didn’t mind the event, they were saying pretty much 1 day is ok, 2 days actually is 3 days of disruption…too much.
Regarding crowding on the course, spreading out the waves a bit more and adjusting cut off times (also previously discussed a bit) for all AG other than some physically challenged or 65+ cut off more like Roth 15 hours, make sure the last AGs are more like the 70.3 waves not the absolute oldest ppl, and that still gets everyone off the course by 12am even though some start times later.
It isn’t ideal but trying to push more ppl onto a single course in a single day with the limited size of the pier and the issue of conjestion on the road plus lack of accom seems to be the 3 big constraints. So rather than aiming to double, perhaps having a +1000 additional slots is reasonable and doable rather than trying to magically double it from 2500 to 5000 instead going to around 3500-4000 ish, while maintaining Kona as a prestige hard to attend event, and enables roughly equal participation MF as seems to be an Ironman non negotiable. Getting 1750-2000 women to Kona is already a lot; 2023 was only a bit more than that. 2024 males were 2400 so that drops to 1750-2000, but 2024 had a backlog from the 2 day split Nice anyhow AFAIK so would still be a reasonable challenge to qualify.
At end of day IM will decide all this, just spitballing really how it could be done someway somehow.
1 Like
GUYS
8 Likes
Sure you can. Rolling start (rather than AG wave), consider multiple transition areas (men here, women there), and yes run the event later (not much room there obviously so it’s likely cutoffs you’re tweaking). That’s one series of options. If IM wanted a solution bad enough (or should I say intelligently enough) they could put it together with a planning commission empowered by the city council to come up with solutions.
The reality is Kona is one of the best race opportunities for the sport of triathlon in the world. We’re not ever going to be a 60,000+ London Marathon event, but those racers race in congested conditions that aren’t ideal and have massive controls on one of the biggest, most expensive cities in the world.
Some of what I’m saying will erode the competitive factor for those trying to be the best 34 year old amateur athlete in the world. Who cares about that title when stacked up against getting as many people as possible to experience the dream of Kona (and the economic value it brings to the community and sport).
You want unequivocal titles? Race pro. Otherwise you get an amateur AG title with an astrix next to it.
And before anyone says Ironman of course wants to make it work, what I see from IM is a lot of dithering about water bottles not focusing on their priority.
Go look at the swim times at the Hawaii race - Men and women. They are not spread out the way they are in other IM races. Then, do the math. No way to put that many people on the course unless the start window is REALLY widened. Otherwise you will have one big peleton on the bike course.
BTW - I prefer rolling starts, but that isn’t the answer at this race.
Note: the pier is not the limiting factor . . .there are ways around that which are pretty simple.
Can bike congestion be solved, yes. But for a 5000 person start your finish line will go until 2:00am, which may be just fine.
I’d submit that on pretty much 112 miles non looped out and back, you can fit 5000 athletes if you can fit 2000+ on a two loop 112 mile out and back in Texas. There will always be some big packs, and always areas to pass and safely slot in, etc. Yes, the rules will get stretched as they always do with dropping back, etc. Every issue you point out can be eased with some mitigation in how and which order the waves start, where the transitions are for each AG, and so on. My purpose in this thought experiment is simply operating under the premise that the more people IM gets to Kona (and other big races with mass appeal) the better the sport will be.
Did they announce 70.3 worlds yet?
7 Likes
Thanks. I didn’t realize they needed a warrant to search phones for US passport holders. That’s good news. I won’t have to delete all my anti-trump memes and photos LOL. I am looking forward to Marbella worlds.
Do wish they would announce 2026 worlds 70.3 location. It’s just over 2 months before the 2026 70.3 qualifiers start.
I do not believe this is true. Unless things have changed, I know for certain that US customs essentially claims once you leave the US and return you forfeit certain rights essentially until you’re granted lawful entry.
See this page:
CBP is at least claiming they have a right to search your devices regardless of citizenship. It doesn’t mention anything about a warrant there, and unless there’s been a recent supreme court case specifically addressing this, you’re likely to get yourself in more trouble than it’s worth arguing with a border cop about needing a warrant.
Naturally they’ll destroy your passwords after getting access to all your accounts, so it’s all good!
“Any passcodes or other means of access provided by the traveler will be used as needed to facilitate the examination; however, they will be deleted or destroyed when no longer needed to facilitate the search of a given device and may not be used to access information that is only stored remotely.”
ps - don’t think most other nations would be any kinder if they wanted to target you. Generally, our security against the police state lies in scale and obscurity.
I mean, it’s not like we have two dedicated threads to this topic already…
3 Likes
It’s a warmup to when the news breaks…
2 Likes