Lately I've observed a tremendous number of people entering a 70.3 as their first triathlon. Back in the day, people hardly ever started at that distance. It usually went something like sprint --> standard --> half --> ironman. So, what changed? I've got some ideas.
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TRANSCRIPT
There’s something I’ve been noticing lately.
I spend a fair amount of time looking at the triathlon subreddit, r/triathlon, and over the past few years I’ve noticed something that I find kind of fascinating.
There are so many people doing a 70.3.
And not just doing a 70.3.
Doing a 70.3 as their first triathlon.
And every time I see one of these posts, I find myself thinking…
Why?
I mean, seriously.
A 70.3 is a long-distance endurance event.
For a reasonably good age-group triathlete, maybe you’re looking at five hours.
For a lot of people, six hours.
Six and a half hours.
Seven hours.
Maybe more.
And I started thinking about that in relation to running.
Because six or seven hours is a really long time to be doing anything athletic.
For most recreational athletes, that's considerably longer than they would take to run a marathon.
And yet somebody who has never done a triathlon will sometimes say:
“I've signed up for a 70.3.”
And everybody says, “Congratulations!”
And then they start talking about wetsuits and nutrition and training plans.
And I think…
How did this become normal?
Because I don't remember it being this way.
I got into triathlon in the 1990s.
And back then, at least as I remember it, the progression was pretty straightforward.
There was sprint distance.
There was what we called standard distance, which became Olympic distance.
And then there was the Ironman.
And somewhere in between there was the Half Ironman.
And I did one of those myself when I was working my way toward doing a full Ironman.
But it wasn't really a thing in the way 70.3 is a thing today.
And this is where I had to go back and check my memory, because I wasn't completely sure.
And it turns out my memory is basically right.
There absolutely were half-Ironman-distance races in the 1990s.
There were some very well-known ones.
Wildflower had a Half Ironman.
Vineman had one.
There were others.
And I even remembered something called the Tin Man.
And this is where I thought, “Wait a minute. Did they actually try to call the half distance the Tin Man?”
Well…
Sort of.
There were races called Tin Man, and some of them were at roughly the half-Ironman distance.
But Tin Man wasn't actually the universal name for the distance.
It was just a name used by particular races.
So, yes, I remembered something real.
But no, there wasn't this giant global thing called the Tin Man series.
And that's the important distinction.
Because the half-Ironman distance existed.
What didn't really exist was the product that we now know as the 70.3.
And that changed in 2005.
That's when Ironman launched the Ironman 70.3 brand.
And I think that was a pretty important moment in the history of triathlon.
Because they didn't invent the distance.
They branded it.
They standardized it.
They created a global series around it.
And then, in 2006, there was a 70.3 World Championship.
And suddenly the half-Ironman wasn't just…
“Well, this is a good race to do on the way to a full Ironman.”
It became a destination.
You could be a 70.3 athlete.
You could qualify for a 70.3 World Championship.
There were 70.3 races all over the world.
And Ironman got very, very good at marketing them.
And I think that's where this gets really interesting.
Because I wonder if the success of 70.3 has actually changed what people think triathlon is.
If you came into the sport in the 1990s, like I did, you might have thought about triathlon as something like:
Sprint.
Then Olympic.
Maybe a Half Ironman.
Maybe eventually an Ironman.
There was a progression.
Today, I think a lot of people enter the sport with the Ironman brand already in their heads.
They see Ironman.
They see 70.3.
They see the World Championship.
They see people racing in these spectacular locations.
They see the professional athletes.
They see the finish-line videos.
They see the “You Are an Ironman” stuff.
And if you're a new athlete, you can very quickly come to the conclusion that this is what triathlon is.
You don't necessarily think:
“I'll start with a sprint.”
You think:
“I'm going to do a 70.3.”
And I think social media has probably accelerated that enormously.
Because what's more impressive on Instagram?
“I completed my first sprint triathlon.”
Or:
“I COMPLETED MY FIRST 70.3!”
You know exactly which one gets the reaction.
And I don't mean that critically.
I understand it.
There's something incredibly appealing about setting a huge goal.
And I'm certainly not going to criticize somebody for doing it.
But I do think it's interesting that we've arrived at a point where doing a six- or seven-hour endurance event can be somebody's introduction to triathlon.
And there's another thing I've been thinking about.
Television.
Because I wonder how much the growth of 70.3 has been helped by the fact that it's actually a really good television product.
A full Ironman is fascinating if you're a triathlete.
But as a television event, it's difficult.
It's a very long day.
The professional athletes are out there for hours and hours.
And then you've got thousands of age-group athletes spread over an even longer period.
A 70.3 gives you a much more compact race.
You've got the swim.
You've got the bike.
You've got the run.
You've got the lead changes.
You've got athletes racing very, very hard.
And you've got an entire race that unfolds in a much more manageable television window.
And I think that's probably important.
Because the more we see something, the more normal it becomes.
And if what we're constantly seeing is professional athletes doing 70.3s…
And amateur athletes doing 70.3s…
And people qualifying for 70.3 Worlds…
Then 70.3 starts to look like the normal thing to aspire to.
And maybe this is where I'm going with all of this.
I think Ironman did something extremely clever.
They took an existing distance and turned it into a brand.
And once you turn something into a brand, you can sell an identity around it.
You're not just doing a 1.9-kilometre swim, a 90-kilometre bike and a half marathon.
You're doing a 70.3.
That number means something.
And it means something because we've been told that it means something.
Now, there's nothing wrong with that.
I'm not anti-70.3.
I've done one.
I've trained for one.
I've spent plenty of time thinking about doing another one.
But I do wonder whether we've lost something along the way.
Because I actually think the Olympic distance is a fantastic race.
It's long enough that you have to train.
It's short enough that you can race it.
You can go hard.
You can recover.
You can have a life outside of triathlon.
And you can get really, really good at it.
And that's actually where I've found myself heading.
For a long time, I assumed the natural progression was toward longer distance.
That's what you did.
You went from sprint to Olympic.
Then you did a 70.3.
Then maybe you did an Ironman.
Longer was somehow better.
More impressive.
More difficult.
But I'm starting to question that.
Maybe the next step isn't always longer.
Maybe it's better.
Maybe instead of asking:
“How far can I go?”
we should sometimes ask:
“How fast can I go?”
Or:
“How good can I get at this distance?”
And that's particularly relevant to me now.
I'm 58.
I've already done the longer stuff.
I've done a 70.3.
I've done Ironman-distance racing.
And now I'm heading toward the 2027 World Triathlon Age Group Championships in Hamburg at the standard distance.
And what I'm finding really interesting about that is that I'm actually excited about getting better at a distance that isn't the longest thing I could possibly do.
I want to get faster.
I want to improve my swim.
I want to improve my bike.
I want to run well off the bike.
And I want to see how good I can get at an Olympic-distance triathlon.
Not how long I can survive.
How well I can race.
And maybe that's the part of this whole 70.3 phenomenon that interests me most.
We've become very good at convincing people that the ultimate achievement in triathlon is going longer.
But maybe there's another way of looking at it.
Maybe completing a seven-hour race isn't necessarily more impressive than doing a two-and-a-half-hour race really, really well.
Maybe the challenge isn't always endurance.
Maybe it's performance.
Maybe it's precision.
Maybe it's figuring out how to squeeze another minute out of a swim, another couple of kilometres per hour out of the bike, another few minutes out of the run.
And maybe…
Just maybe…
The next step in triathlon doesn't always have to be longer.
Sometimes it can just be better.
