This maybe a stupid question but I’m curious…
What type of marker or substance due they use for body marking at the Hawaii Ironman?
The reason I ask… after last years race, a woman I knew who completed Hawaii, had her number suntanned onto her arm. Now looking at a post-race picture of her, while she was wearing her finishers medals her number is still visable and legible after 14 hours of racing…
Every event I ever participated in uses Sharpie type markers and I’m lucky to have a number on me at the end of the swim.
PS - By looking at the picture the number on her arm is about the thickness of the line football players put under there eyes.
Whatever kind of ink they use in Kona is infinitely better than anything used in any other race. I had “1296” effectively tattooed in white down each arm until about May of this year. The organisers keep emphasising that you shouldn’t put on suncream before you get marked, and last year my arms were rubbed, I think with a light alcohol-based substance, before being marked. It took a lot of scrubbing to get it off that evening. No matter what suncream we use, it doesn’t seem effective for long, what with the swim, and with sweating over 20 pints.
Someone should make suncream out of that stuff. No other suncream even comes close.
Doug
I did ChesapeakeMan on Saturday, I have scrubbed 5x since being marked and still have remnants of 115 on legs and arms. They also marked your right hand for 1st time Ultra participants with a star, as the race wore on it slowly disappeared and was completely gone when I finished.
It’s the jumbo Sharpie markers. The trick is that pretty much every person gets his/her arms wiped down with alcohol before getting marked. Then, every number has to be made in a certain way, using only one tip of the marker and each body marker has a couple extras in their back pocket.
Last year they used the stamps and ink pads. That was a huge fiasco and took way too long.
clm, Kona body marker 1999, 2000, 2001, 2003 