Instead of stocking aid stations with nutrition for volunteers to mix and hand you, they should stick aid stations with your personal needs bags. Each aid station can have what you decide you need, by putting it in a bag with your number. Slow slightly, grab and go, or dismount. I’d be totally fine with that scenario.
But keep in mind in terms of total waste, I’m going to have some bottles in a bag that I replace with bottles that I chuck in the trash. So I’m still chucking bottles.
On the run, I guess I’d run with my trail running vest.
The big change in this scenario is times would go up as athletes bike/run slower to facilitate the hand offs and we’d suffer more from not having copious amounts of ice and water to dump on ourselves – so slower again.
But I agree with Hawaii. Every time I step of the plane, there’s a magic in the air. Anyone who doesn’t sense it, is dead to mother Earth.
Your message is well-intentioned, but it sits on contradictions you never address.
You call for experimentation, new formats, and “doing something different,” but then defend Kona as the immutable heart of the sport. You can’t have it both ways. If triathlon needs variety and independence, then the cultural centrepiece of IRONMAN also needs to evolve — or at least be examined with the same critical lens you apply to everyone else.
The sustainability section exposes the same tension. You highlight single-use plastics, aid-station waste, and the need for new models — fair. But you ignore the obvious: Kona is one of the least sustainable race destinations on the planet. A world championship that requires long-haul flights from nearly everywhere is fundamentally incompatible with the environmental values you’re arguing for. Five-day “race vacations” in the most remote archipelago on earth are not sustainable, no matter how many reusable bottles are handed out. You should calculate the impact of every ironman race with reusable bottles vs having the world champ at the most remote place possible) ie use facts vs emotional arguments.
You also talk about athletes needing to be better neighbors. True — but again, you skip the core issue: the event model itself places enormous strain on small communities. Behaviour matters, but the structure of the event matters more.
If you want the sport to change, then apply the same standards to its icons. Otherwise, the argument becomes emotional rather than coherent: nostalgia for Kona mixed with a demand for innovation; concern for sustainability without addressing the largest sustainability driver; criticism of athlete behaviour without acknowledging the systemic design that enables it.
Triathlon won’t make progress by asking everyone else to adapt while its flagship event remains exempt from scrutiny.
Maui is great for the first time in Hawaii trip and if you have kids. Great beaches, really delivers on what you envision “Hawai’i” to be like. We have vacationed there 4 times, twice with our son when he was a bit younger, and it was great. But he’s 12 now and we have pivoted to Kauai which is really old school Hawai’i with more sort of adventure activities then say Maui or even the Big Island.
To build on your 1995 IMC story, I went 10:25 after a flat and a bonk on the run (I had just run a 2:52 open marathon in the spring and managed to run 4:10 somehow). I think that was my PB Penticton swim in 56 min. In any case, Lynne, Tony and I were on the Canadian Armed Forces team for world military games and the week before IMC at least Sharon and I raced Canadian Nationals in Ft. McMurray (I think Peter Reid was 7th there). In any case, a few days after IMC, Lynne, Sharon, Tony and I were on a plane to Rome Italy for the first World Military Games Triathlon. Lynne and Sharon teamed up for team silver medal in the women’s race. I think I ended up in 48th, but this is the link to the Kona Pro race. The room for the German team was next to the Canadian team, and I see the names on the door, and it has Normann Stadler 1994 world duathlon Champion and this guy Hellriegel who no one knew I but I had read in Triathlete magazine that the guy won IM Lanza and was 4th in Roth. The other guy on their team was Rainier Mueller who had an 8:08 in Roth and I believe 3rd to Spencer Smith and Brad Bevan at 1994 ITU Worlds in NZ (by the way, Tim de Boom won 20-24 at that race). In any case, made friends with Hellriegel as we ended up at a few track sessions and one bike ride together. All the training sessions were planned and all the teams went together.
Well no one was paying attention to Hellriegel. I told our coach Jake Kennedy (RIP) that the Hellriegel guy was going to win (I think he was 6th at 1992 ITU worlds), or these guys Olivier Marceau (2000 ITU worlds champion) or Dmitri Gaag from Khazakstan (1999 ITU worlds champ later popped for EPO).
In any case the day before World Military games we were taken out to ride the bike course, so Hellriegel road it either twice or three times and when we asked him why he said his big goal was Hawaii and as we were only allowed one bike session (the rest of the time we were confined to barracks twiddling our thumbs), he didn’t want to get out of shape for Kona.
So Hellriegel wins World Military games and says, “Now I go to Lanzarote to bike 1000km per week before Kona” and it worked, he comes off the bike 13 min before Mark Allen and he holds him off till Mark and Dave Hill
Well that’s my story from 1995 Kona without going there, but hanging out with Hellriegel and a few others before that in Rome.
I never got to Kona until 2006 on my 13th IM. I kept missing slots from 8 seconds off to 10 min off but I never really trained the long rides and long runs, I trained more like an Olympic distance guy and paid with fades at IM.
And yes, there’s obvious tension between the carbon footprint of flying to a remote island in the middle of the Pacific and trying to create a more sustainable in-race experience. I almost included an aside paragraph about that. But in general, we’re less likely to change people’s travel behavior and more likely to change their racing experience, even if slightly more inconvenient. It’s fundamentally easier to tell people “hey, you’re refilling your own bottles” than it is to stop them from going to remote places by airplane.
This is the way. Shit place to train the bike or run (especially on the North Shore), but hard to beat an OW swim in Hanalei. Also, in terms of different norms in Hawaii try filming yourself surfing anywhere on Kauai and see if you can escape without serious personal injury.
That’s why we stayed right on Kiahuna Beach next to Poipu so he could surf without getting killed! It was perfect! I just ran on Hoonani Rd. and Poipu Rd. and it was fine.
It’s very rocky and lots of coral. Poipu is the only safe beach with more gentle surf.
Haha well both. Some of the breaks around Kauai are some of the best Hawaii has to offer. The locals do not want anyone to film and blow up their spot. They don’t want the crowds that the other islands have to deal with now.
my brother was going to come in from Aus so we could go fish in AK.. but he won’t travel here under the current regime. These rules are going to stop a lot of tourism, which seems counterproductive.
never going to do an IM now, but still have dreams of doing a short tri in Hawaii, just because it’s Hawaii..
A few years back, there was an article in Outside Magazine about local surfers being very protective of their waves and how they’d resort to violence when interlopers (usually meaning visitors from the mainland) appeared.