Ever stress over how you get your bike to Ironman in one piece? Tired of hassling with the airlines? Marc Lauzon of TriBike Transport is a former UPS employee with an MBA and a good idea. Pick up bikes headed to IMNA events all over the country and deliver them with kid gloves to the race venue.
He gets a big truck and drives all over the U.S. picking the bikes up and then delivering them to a collection point at the race venue. Marc says, “I like to drive, and it seemed like a good idea.”
Lauzon made money on his first trip, after sending out 6 e-mails as an experiment and getting 48 referrals.
Make arrangements to drop off our bike at your LBS tri shop collection point as designated by Marc. You can get your pre-Ironman tune-up at your LBS right then! It is total convenience and one stop shopping.
Then: Marc drives the big TriBike Transport truck to the LBS collection point nearest you. The bikes get carefully loaded on board the TriBike Transport truck under Marc’s watchful eye. Marc personally loaded ever bike he picked up from us. And he secures them to the custom built TriBike Transport conformal pallets that maintain a security seperation between the bikes. He checks the route and arranges the next pick up on his way to the big race. And the TriBike Transport Truck leaves the LBS with your bike in safe keeping for the next stop, Bill Linneman’s Mission Bay in Elgin, Illinois on the way to Coeur d’Alene Ironman!
Contemplating it for Florida, so would be curious as to any feedback as well on the service. Seems like a pretty cool idea on the surface—the only real inconvenience, if you can really call it that, is driving the bike over to a shop about a half-hour away.
When do the bikes typically arrive at the race location?
With all the stories about UPS/FedEx mangling bikes and Trico/TriAll3/Sefras cases getting beat up on flights, I’ve been wondering more and more why someone would NOT use this service for a race they were not driving to. I’ll be driving to my two IMNA events this year, so I won’t need it, but I’m definitely going to check it out in the future.
Does Mark have any plans to expand to other major events that lots of folks travel to (Alcatraz, WildFlower, Memphis, etc)? Or, even better, does he have any thoughts about starting some sort of service to Kona? I think that would be huge.
We were a shipping spot for IMAZ and all the athletes were real happy with the service from Seattle. I think they do a good job and alleviate a lot of stress with the bike case/ shipping factor.
I was talking to Marc about this. The bikes usually arrive at the race site on the Thrusday prior to a Sunday event. That usually provides enough time for people to double check the bikes and do a short ride on the course.
Since the bikes are not dissassembled for the trip there is a lot less mechanical worry, therefore you may not havve to be as concerned about getting there in time to crrect any mechanical problems that may result from shipping.
So when do they pick up the bike? That ended up being the deciding factor for me to fly with my bike instead of shipping. Way to much $$$ to ship 3 day for a bike via UPS/FedEX. I was the last person on every leg of my flight as I watched them load my bike onto the plane at every leg. If the bike didn’t get loaded, I wasn’t going
