Been on Slowtwich a while, mainly just lurk on the forums and dont post much… It’s Ironman South Africa in just under two weeks time (6 April) in Port Elizabeth - I’m a local doing it for the second time and was wondering if any Slowtwitchers (particularly US and other foreigners) are travelling down for the race? We get quite a few European racers coming down for the percieved “easy” Kona slots.
Shoot if you have any questions about the race / Port Elizabeth / South Africa you’d like to know. The course is a little different to last year, but happy to try give you some impressions and tips etc…
Yup, I’ll be there, travelling from India. This is my 2nd full IM, hopefully it won’t be quite as tough as Zurich last year!
I did have the vague notion that I might be in with a slight chance of a Kona slot, but given that a work project has meant that I’ve been living in a hotel for the past 2 months, no pool access, no training buddies, and utterly appalling quality and dangerous roads, that idea is well and truly out of the window now. I’ll be lucky to make it through the swim
They basically added a new loop the bike course - so you now turn off right off Seaview road after the (only real) climb previously, and do approx 30km loop where you then rejoin the old course on Seaview road. Course is the same from there back to the start. There are 3 or 4 decent climbs in the new section, which the RD reckons will add 15 minutes to the old bike times for the average rider.
Course is now a lot more scenic, with the inland section going through farm lands and then 10-15km extra along the coast (not great if the wind blows however!)
Also, now doing two bike loops of 90km as opposed to 3x60km will make it much better.
