Sebastian Kienle said it best:
“If you feel ready & prepared for an Ironman, chances are you’re completely overtrained”
3 Likes
Yup 1 % overtrained your fucked , 10 %under trained your set .
1 Like
Beware the quiet ones. Right after 70.3 Dallas, saw an IG reel of an interview with Lionel being a bit cocky that he actually didn’t feel good. RVB commented something along the lines of : “Great you can win when you aren’t feeling great. I willl see you in IMTX” 
2 Likes
@talbotcox said sooooo many times that records don’t count, that looking at them is stupid, that you can’t compare, blah blah blah then they spend 30+ minutes discussing it and hyping a “record” obtained on a C level race after a shortened swim and some clearly peculiar conditions.
Like what the actual F? Did y’all get lobotomized? Or maybe because Sam Long did it is different from Messias’ 2.26 run or a bunch of other very (and realistic) fast times?!
I am genuinely flabbergasted. Especially without anybody else calling out this nonsense.
6 Likes
Yes, the bias towards certain athletes is crazy. I do think records are a good talking point, but it’s so hypocritical how they just fob off some records but glaze others.
3 Likes
All you need is for the wind to shift, or become stronger/weaker in a favourable way. Some places like Cozumel are known for having a headwind first, tailwind later bike course, with the wind usually picking up significantly over the duration of the bike leg.
Hard to believe these discussions are even had in good faith…
Take a look at Seth’s ride. 1:50:36 or about 90s slower on 40 watts less.
I wish I lived in the magical world of unicorns. Science is such a downer 
2 Likes
Happens all the time here on ST…Has for years.
But isn’t this just all chatter (or per thread title ‘banter’), and you’re taking it far too seriously?
Fwiw I don’t agree with @talbotcox 's apparent opinion on this latest ‘best time ever’. Also @Thorsten maintains an excellent record of fastest this that and the other on his trirating - Ironman-Distance Records but not 70.3 - so the PTN fills that gap.
However fastest times are a legitimate ‘remarking point’ YMMV.
Clearly Long (and Zorgnotti) rode fast over a 70.3 Gulf Coast bike course closer to 90km than 89km. The truncated swim (<700m) will have meant weak swimmer Long was well less fatigued leaving T1: if he’d swam 1900m he would have been unable to ride that fast. Let’s not forget he then ran a 1:10 off that: not shabby.
@kajet has pointed out that environmental conditions probably helped. But you could say the same about Sawe’s 1:59:30. What’s the point?
I think any fastest bike or run time recorded in a race where the swim has been cut should be discounted; as I said:
Which (non) records do you think PTN fob off? Genuine question.
Haug and Philipp running 2:38 at Roth and Hamburg respectively - were those performances ‘fobbed off’? Think we can expect Philipp and Loevseth to bounce one another into a fast overall time ftw in Hamburg in 26 days, and same for Roth with Philipp v Matthews in July.
Knibb and Matthews riding 4:19 and 4:20 in Texas last year got plenty of attention. And allowed chat this year about whether Loevseth could beat those (she didn’t, and didn’t need to).
I assume you’re talking about Messias running a 2:26 fastest ever run in IM Brazil and the off hand way PTN treated that, rather than eulogy. I have checked strava and the distance is legit (maybe 150m short, easily within tolerance). It’s reasonable, as many did contemporaneously, to observe he was, deliberately or not, riding relatively slowly (16 minutes on the bike slower than winner Taccone who typically averages >4:12). Superb run. Is Stornes’ run to win IMWC Nice with a 2:29 better? Not by the stopwatch - which is what matters - but it’s worth “glazing” (copyright Ben). Hanson ran a super fast 2:28 at Roth last year, but he’d lost 17 minutes to Laidlow on the bike, and came #9.
Kona records were mentioned, but there’s a bit of shading there too. Ryf rode 4:26 on the way to winning in 2018. Matthews ran 2:47 on the way to #2. But Laidlow’s 3:57 was clearly and deliberately at the expense of finishing the triathlon competitively. He finished, so it enters the record book, but for me the best ride at Kona ever is Chevalier riding 4:01 and then running to #4, less than a minute off the podium. Iden 2:36 to win in 2022 remains top and next up is Lange’s 2:37, also for the win.
LCB has the fastest overall time at 8:24 with Lange the best man at 7:36.
Yes, the examples below would all be valid examples of the point PTN has made: ‘Who cares, records don’t matter in triathlon.’
Part of the reason this is being talked about is because Sam won a relatively low SOF (Strength of Field) race. Wurf didn’t get the same praise in Texas last year for the fastest Ironman ride, mostly because he slipped to 8th on the run and was said to have ‘over-biked.’ But with a higher SOF, this could have happened to Sam—like in Oceanside a few weeks ago. Then, the ride looks less impressive.
If Messias is said to have been ‘sandbagging’ the bike because he lost time versus the fastest in that race, then why would it not be said that Sam is sandbagging the swim? Which is obviously not the case. Being slower than someone else in a discipline doesn’t mean they are going easier.
In my eyes, this ride by Sam might not have even been the best middle-distance ride of the weekend. Will Draper won a higher SOF event with a bigger gap to the second-fastest ride. In their head-to-head PTO races, they ride similarly and have had some good battles. Yet, barely a word about that has been spoken. Had they swapped races and Will had done Gulf Coast while Sam did Challenge Salou, would PTO be talking about Will’s bike record anywhere near as much? I think not.
2 Likes
In 2025 there were over 100 70.3 races run and won. How many of those winning performances were mentioned here?
So many great performances over the years hardly get mentioned but my favourite by far was when Rico Bogen won the 70.3 Worlds. It is seriously like that race never happened.
True. It was a great performance all around. I think part of Bogen’s disappearance is he went on to focus heavily on T100 and Ironman was a occasional side gig. It unfortunately shows how T100 is a great place to race but not a great place to be relevant in the conversation (among the chattering laypeople who have conversations about triathlon that is).
2 Likes
Went to look to see what the splits were. PTO results are ‘bare’: no splits. How good was Draper’s ride? Or run?
Strava suggests 1:11:43 for 20.83km (so about 1:13 for the full distance) and he rode 88.6km(+582m climb - way hillier than Gold Coast) in 1:57. Congrats for the win. He’s heading to race the big boys in San Francisco.
ETA: People can get the splits with some clicking here (they do not make it easy):
You forgot 2 words in your sentence !
He in a content creator, not a context thinker. Best not to dive to much into their logic and thinking.
FYI Sam Laidlow Nice worlds 2023 is one of the greatest bike rides ever but not because of the time but the result. no one on that course is going to set a fast looking time, but we see the gap and run off the bike as well. kind of have to add context to things beyond the time posted.
6 Likes
Bogen is probably one of the “least talked about” world champs ever.
What you said partially explains it but he doesn’t have that bustling personality that other WC have unfortunately. Probably need someone like Talbot to create some social media buzz:)
If someone is going to be the keeper of records, and it seems the PTN want to be, then the answer is relatively straightforward.
They have to develop, and publish a list of criteria for which records will be counted. I’m fine if they do what they are currently doing - which is to just absorb the IM, T100, etc datasets, and then remove the known outliers - but they need a published list of criteria for doing so.
A few ideas:
- Course has to be verified as within x% tolerance of specified distance. Races can count until proven out of tolerance. Age grouper Strava is fine for this, so long as they tell state the tolerance is supposed to be.
- Previous legs of the triathlon have to be within y% of stated distance
- Athlete has to finish the race for the individual leg records to count.
- (something here about down current swims)
They’re not trying to be the Guinness book of records, or World Athletics for that matter, and so I don’t think the burden of proof needs to be all that great. But if they are going to be the standard bearer for this kind of thing, they should state what the criteria they’re using, and as a consequence which races they’ve excluded.
2 Likes
Bogen’s Lahti win and therefore (lack of) notoriety also stems from the unhelpful clash of PTO Asian Open a week earlier which sucked talent away and sucked the legs out of those male athletes who thought they could double up.
I note that Simmonds excelled in the double (#4 in Singapore and made the podium at Lahti). Mesdames Gentle, Sodaro, Haug, LCB chose to prioritise the PTO race - various reasons. Every one of those would be vying for at least the podium in Lahti standalone (Knibb, Matthews, Simmonds in the event).
Blummenfelt, Long and West raced in Singapore and all three actually made it to Finland, but West was sick and DNS and the other two maybe should’ve, but they soldiered on to #35 and #12 respectively. Sanders, in a rare foreign excursion, was DQ’d when in a position to make top 5.
Bogen races Roth as his first full distance in July, but he has T100 SF first.
2 Likes
I do have to laugh that any process that is going to have an % tolerance of the distance (and that’s the current setup within WT rules and regs for courses). That sorta invalidates the whole point of a “record’, but I get it. Triathlon has a bunch of moving parts, so it’s going to be that GPS file allows it to count, ok cool. But it’s just funny to me the allowances we have to make to get records to count (which is why “records” have never really matter in tri)
1 Like