Me and a buddy were discussing this over the weekend in Galveston and wanted to get some other thoughts on the subject. As has been reported and discussed previously, IMTX dates are going to change in 2017 to late April. At least that’s the latest reported information I can find. With the movement of the Galveston race this year to late April as well, does this mean a further move of the Galveston race is to be expected on 2017? I don’t see both races being held the last weekend in April, so something has to give.
I believe Ironman used to, or maybe still does, host a 5150 event in September in Galveston? It seemed to make sense that if they aren’t going to move it back to early April and let people use it as a tune up race for IMTX, that they would maybe move it to September? This also would coincide with the announcement that they are trying to get the 70.3 Worlds race in 2017, which would be in Aug/Sept time frame anyway?
i heard a rumor that they were going to just switch weekends, but I do not know if that was true or not. That would mean IMTX in April and 70.3 in May.
May 14, 2016
April 22, 2017
April 28, 2018
April 27, 2019
April 25, 2020
Two schools of thought on what they will do with Galveston. They do run the two races mutually exclusive of each other and do not really consider the timing of the dates as there are only a couple of hundred people that actually do both races. If you follow that school of thought they would probably keep Galveston at the early April date and have the three week gap.
Thanks for the info, I guess I never really thought about them moving it back to early April. Any ideas why they moved it to late April this year? I am definitely not complaining, as I enjoyed the non wetsuit swim, but curious why they moved to late April this year and really never heard a reason for the change.
I recall the Galveston date this year being late because of the Easter weekend being early April this year. I would be willing to bet a lot it moves back to early April next year.
It needs to be after spring break calms down and not be Easter. In Texas, spring break is generally one of the first 3 weeks in March, and Galveston does get some traffic from the midwest whose spring breaks are later, but likely not enough to move the needle too far on hotel room sales, which is the motivator for the city to give the permits. There is also Kappa Weekend somewhere around that time that would not mix well with a triathlon.