Originally published at: Hometown Hero: Hannah Berry Looks for a Top Finish to Pad Her Pro Series Standing - Slowtwitch News
OK, it’s not exactly her hometown, but I’m sure the folks here in Taupo will treat her as one at tomorrow’s IRONMAN 70.3 World Championship. Hannah Berry is no stranger to success here in Taupo – she won the 70.3 race here in 2019 and 2023, and won the full-distance IRONMAN New Zealand in 2021.
As Ryan Heisler pointed out in our story on the IRONMAN Pro series earlier this week, Berry arrives in Taupo with a very realistic shot of finishing fourth in the final standings since she only has one 70.3 race on the books this year – her seventh-place finish at IRONMAN 70.3 Western Australia two weeks ago.
Berry had planned from the start of the year to finish up the season with the race in Busselton and then here in Taupo. She’s done well on the IRONMAN front this year, finishing fourth at IRONMAN Texas, taking the win at IRONMAN Cairns and then rounding out the full-distance season in Nice with a 10th-place finish. She DNF’d at IRONMAN 70.3 Zell am See, which is why she’ll be earning full points for her race here tomorrow.
Committing to the IRONMAN Pro Series pushed Berry to stretch her limits as a pro triathlete.
“I mean, it was a big step up for me in the Iron distance,” she said. “Prior to that, I hadn’t done that many IRONMAN races, and they were all very much spaced well. So for me to do three IRONMANs in five or six months was always going to be a big ask. But I’m really stoked with how it went this year. We seemed to manage it pretty well.”
Berry was happy to round out the season with the two shorter races.
“For me, I really need like the speed and the specificity for the 70.3 distance to go well,” she said in an interview just before the 70.3 race in Busselton. “For these two races, it has actually been really good ’cause I’ve focused. I’ve really gone into half-IRONMAN training for a seven-week week block into this. That’s why I had these two races on the calendar from the start of the year, ’cause I kinda saw them as an opportunity to switch to 70.3 training, and then do both of them in a block together. So I’m hoping it pays off.”
Berry at the pre-race press conference in Taupo. Photo: Kevin Mackinnon
Her seventh in the competitive field in Busselton bodes well for another good finish here in Taupo, with an extra 500 points in the mix since Saturday’s race is the world championship.
“I was kind of doing a little bit of math on the Pro series and if I race well, maybe I can sneak up to fourth which is still a really good payday,” she said – fourth is worth US$70,000, with $50,000 going to the fifth-place finisher in the series. “It’s more money than any of us have seen in the sport before this year. It’s been really cool to see. That injection of money into the pro racing made things really exciting. What we’re doing now is hopefully gonna pay off for us financially as well, which is really cool, because it’s not the easiest way to make money.”
While others might be nervous about racing in front of a “home” crowd, Berry is looking forward to tomorrow’s race.
“It’s so exciting,” she said. “I’m so lucky that I get this opportunity to have a home-country, world championship. Being from New Zealand, it’s never happened before, and here I am racing at the time that it happened. So, I just feel very lucky that I get a chance to do a world championship at home. I’m going to enjoy the support out there on course and race as hard as I can for the last race of the season.”
Berry is a late entrant to the sport – she “fell” into the triathlon while she was at school for engineering. She played volleyball at university, but when she got injured, hit the pool to stay in shape. She met up with a bunch of triathletes at the pool, and before she knew it she was taking on her first race, and found she was really good at this swim, bike, run thing. She did her first pro race in 2017. She had finished her PhD and was balancing life doing post-doc research and competing as a triathlete. She decided to go full-time with the sport at the end of 2019.
Now, five years later, Berry is on the verges of a top finish in the IRONMAN Pro Series and racing in her home country as one of the women to watch. One of the reasons Berry is able to remain so calm is likely because she’s already achieved more than she ever thought she could as an athlete.
“I never really intended to become a professional, so I feel like everything’s a bit of a bonus,” she said. “I mean, it’s not like I’m gonna slow down because I think I’ve ticked everything off. I’m just continually trying to get better.”