in the most recent poll (before the poll up on the site now), “What did every competitor have to do prior to the 1981 Ironman?”
most of you got it right. about three-quarters of you guessed that we were weighed prior to the race, as opposed to being given an eye test or being forced to sign an anti-doping pledge (either of which, in retrospect, would have been a more prudent pre-race requirement).
harry cordellos, by the way, would have failed the eye test. he raced kona in 1981. harry is entirely sightless. he raced on the back of a tandem. that was pretty early on for an entirely blind athlete to have raced the ironman. only about 100 people had ever completed the ironman prior to the 1981 race. but harry has been a pretty special athlete throughout his life.
monty, when he sees the thread will, i hope, explain why we were forced to weigh in prior to the race.
weren’t they going to pull athletes at certain parts of the race that dropped a certain percentage of body weight? so some just didn’t eat for days prior to weigh in
yes. monty will tell you the story. i will say that they were so diligent about weighing us throughout the race that it didn’t help our finish times any.
I recall doing an approximate oly distance race in Madison Wisconsin in August 1980 where they weighed us beforehand and again coming off the bike leg with a 2 min mandatory break so that we didn’t drop dead on the run.
Yes, at check in, but they didn’t weigh you during the race. At least that was my experience at IMF. I think they used it as a base line for after the race in the event you required medical attention.
Yes, they were going to pull athletes that lost 10% or more of their body weight. But this has to go down as one of the worst thought plans ironman has ever implemented(2nd only to the $1000 cut in front of the line one!). They weighed us in on wednesday before the race, so as you may have read in my 3 part series on this race, you could do several things to lose some pre race weight. Then we loaded up like crazy, figured that was what we should do anyway for this one day adventure race. So actual starting weights race morning could be and were for many of us, 10% over the scratch weight on wednesday.
During the bike we had 3 on course weigh stations, and one at the bike finish for 4 on the bike. The run had a couple, so 6 all together. And keep in mind we stripped down for the scratch weigh in, and did the others fully clothed, with shoes, watered down clothes, and full water bottles tucked into our jerseys with some food. You literally would have to lose something like 30% to even approach that 10% scratch weigh in, and only way to do that would to have a leg amputated. It really was a big waste of time, and there was no science what so ever that even the 10% number meant anything, or had any health bearing.
But it does allow me to handicap my times from that day even further on the bike, that along with the 115 mile course measured out by someones car whose odometer was off a bit… (-;
One year Dave Scott’s crew chief handed him a full water bottle that he held behind his back as they were doing the weight check.
It just goes to show where sports science was at that time, and how extreme the Ironman was considered. Basically the race organizers just didn’t want anyone to die.