For Triathlon enthusiasts, Kona is a special place. In fact, in Kona, on Hawaii’s so-called Big Island, the Ironman World Championship is being run, a race that awards the title of world champion and at the same time celebrates the uniqueness of the discipline’s longest, most grueling and legendary specialty.
Legendary because the Ironman (remember 3.8 km swim, 180 km bike and 42.195m walk) was born right here in 1977 (first race held in February 1978, 15 athletes at the start). It was supposed to be the ultimate test of which sport was capable of training the strongest athletes (iron, in fact) among swimmers, cyclists and runners, but instead it has become a sport in its own right with its own very strong personality.
To understand it, one must not think of a race divided into three fractions but of one very long, continuous sprint to the finish line in which effort must be managed evenly on pain of crashing into the famous “wall” that endurance athletes know so well.
Thousands of triathletes dive and bike and run in Kona Bay to close 8 hours and 140 miles later on their effort. 8 hours in the case of the professionals because among the amateurs (so-called age groups) someone arrives only seconds before the end of the race, crawling on their arms and without an ounce of glucose left in their bodies.
That is the immense and inexplicable fascination of this race, for which thousands of people around the world face enormous sacrifices every year, carving out training space between work and family, first to qualify (perhaps the hardest part) and then to finish the race of a lifetime on time, battling the heat and humidity of the island where the wind can reach as high as 45 mph making the bike portion through the lava fields a living hell.
But the Ironman is also the only competition in the world in which cheering at the finish line counts for the first as well as the very last runner, and sometimes even for those who finish out of time. It is the only race where the first runner waits for the last one to crown him with flowers from Hawaii saying “you are an Ironman my friend.”