Monday, August 29, 2005
Ironman Hawaii Participant Guide
Sunday, August 21, 2005
Distance Conversion Tool
This is helpful for meter/yard/mile conversions. Thanks to Linda E. for sending me the link.
click for conversion tool
click for conversion tool
Thursday, August 11, 2005
How this crazy race got started
How this crazy race got started
The triathlon's popularity has exploded since its humble beginning
by Timothy Carlson
Triathlon is a sport practiced by aerobic stalwarts on five continents, solidly entrenched in the Olympics since 2000 and seen by millions of television viewers every year in its ultimate incarnation -- the daunting daylong test called the Ford Ironman World Championship in Hawaii.
The sport’s first stars -- Mark Allen, Dave Scott and Paula Newby -- along with hardy amateurs used the lava fields of Hawaii as proving ground for the ultimate test in human endurance. As images of the courageous caught the public’s imagination, the term Ironman came to be universally recognized as a fundamental unit of measure, its meaning as clear as a mile, located emotionally somewhere beyond the marathon.
Today there are an estimated 3 million triathletes worldwide entranced by the allure of swim-bike-run at various distances. Pros can make hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. There is so much interest in this year's race on Oct. 15, in fact, that Ironmanlive.com will carry a live Web feed of the race.
But just 27 years ago, a tiny field entered the water in Waikiki to embark on the adventure of the first Iron Man, as it was called until being shortened to the one-word "Ironman" in 1981.
The term triathlon was originally used for a now-defunct event at the 1904 Olympics in St. Louis that consisted of a long jump, shot put and 100-yard dash. Then there were two precursors to modern triathlon’s swim-bike-run format. Just after World War I, the Honolulu YMCA had an event it called “Plunge, Pedal and Plod,” a bicycle segment, followed by a run on the beach and finished with a swim. And in 1921, the Petit Perillon swim club in Marseilles, France, held an event called Course des Trois Sports -- a seven-kilometer bike, five-kilometer run and 200-meter out-and-back swim in the Mediterranean.
Flash forward to the running boom of the 1970s, ignited by Frank Shorter’s marathon gold in the Munich Olympics in 1972. On Sept. 25, 1974, the San Diego Track Club Newsletter advertised the first triathlon in the modern sense, a “Run, Cycle, Swim” cross-training event on Fiesta Island. The loosely structured event began with a five-mile bike ride, followed by six miles of running broken up by short swims.
Three of the 46 entrants were enthusiastic representatives of the fitness revolution -- Navy Cmdr. John Collins, his wife Judy and son Michael. In 1977, Collins was stationed on Hawaii, and he and Judy were enjoying the boisterous awards ceremony for the Oahu Perimeter Relay Run. A long-running argument erupted: Who among the swimmers, cyclists and runners was the fittest? Cmdr. Collins was inspired to take the three toughest Hawaiian endurance events -- the 2.4-mile Waikiki Roughwater Swim, the 112 miles of the 115-mile Around Oahu Bike race (originally held over two days), finished off with a 26.2-mile run on the Honolulu Marathon course. “I said the gun will go off at 7 a.m., the clock will keep running, and whoever finishes first we will call the Iron Man,” recalled Collins.
On Feb. 18, 1978, 18 entered, 15 started and 12 finished the event and received trophies handcrafted by Collins himself, appropriately topped by a human figure with a hole in the head. While most in the field hoped they could merely survive, a brutal race broke out between two 2-hour, 30-minute marathoners, former Navy SEAL John Dunbar and a Honolulu taxi driver, former military pentathlete Gordon Haller. When Dunbar ran out of water halfway through the marathon and substituted beer with disastrous consequences, Haller charged ahead and won in 11 hours, 46 minutes, 58 seconds.
The next year, “Sports Illustrated” writer Barry McDermott caught wind of the Iron Man while on assignment in Hawaii. Intrigued, amused and inspired by that year’s winner, Tom Warren, a San Diego tavern owner and former University of Southern California swimmer happily obsessed with self-imposed endurance tests, McDermott wrote a lyrical 10-page feature honoring the race’s wild cast of characters.
The article sparked hundreds of letters to the Collinses, asking for entry information -- plus a request from ABC “Wide World of Sports” to broadcast the 1980 event. When Collins was inevitably assigned back to the mainland, he turned over the race to Valerie Silk, wife of early sponsor Hank Grundman, who ran the Nautilus Fitness Centers in Honolulu. Seeing that the rising number of entries would soon make the Ironman untenable on Honolulu’s narrow roads, Silk scouted out several alternatives before settling on the wide and uncrowded highways through the lava fields of the Kona coast on the Big Island of Hawaii for the 1981 event.
Picked for traffic management and safety, it was fortuitous that the desolate and forbidding beauty of the lava fields and the exhausting challenge of the heat, humidity and 45 mph mumuku winds on the Kona coast gave Ironman Hawaii its signature identity and challenge.
Following the February 1982 Ironman, Silk switched the event to October. It was in that final February race that Cal Poly student Julie Moss found herself the leading woman by 30 minutes after the bike. Untutored in race-day nutrition, Moss hit the wall hard with just a quarter mile to go, wobbling and falling three times like a punch-drunk fighter, then struggling to her feet.
Just 10 yards from the finish line, Moss fell and was unable to get up, so she started to crawl. Ten feet from the line, Kathleen McCartney caught and passed Moss for the win, a moment caught on TV cameras. When the segment ran with heart-tugging flute music and slow motion, the young, freckled-face Moss’ inspiring crawl galvanized the public and even inspired Moss’ future husband, Mark Allen, to take up the sport. (Allen went on to win the Ironman six times.) Moss, an everywoman who proved that ordinary people can dream and accomplish extraordinary things, became the Patron Saint of Digging Deep for thousands of people who flocked to the Ironman.
The year Moss inspired the masses, a set of professional short-course triathlons began and eventually evolved into the current Olympic distance triathlon -- a 1.5-kilometer swim, 40-kilometer bike and 10-kilometer run. These were dominated by Dave Scott, Scott Tinley, Scott Molina and Mark Allen, a group set of tri-heroes known as The Big Four.
By 1989, Canadian Les McDonald led the development of an international governing body called the International Triathlon Union, which held the first official World Championship in Avignon, France, and which fought for and eventually won Olympic acceptance. That same year, Silk sold the rights to the Ironman name and race to James Gills, an amateur Ironman triathlete and Florida ophthalmologist who created a worldwide network of more than two dozen Ironmans, growing the Ironman brand to a multimillion-dollar corporation.
Triathlon growth exploded after the Sydney Olympics in 2000. From that year to today, amateur membership in USA Triathlon grew from 19,000 to more than 60,000, and many more than that compete in one or two local triathlons a year. There are prestigious Ironman races in Canada, Germany, France, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Lanzarote, Australia, New Zealand, Korea, Japan, Brazil, South Korea and South Africa.
Since Gordon Haller finished the first Ironman in just under 12 hours, today’s talented pros have reduced the course record to 8:04:08. The entry fee for Ironman Hawaii has risen from $5 to $450. While the first Ironman offered winner and finishers alike the welded trophy, the top winners today take home $110,000.
And while John and Judy Collins handled all 15 who wanted to compete, now getting into the Ford Ironman World Championship is much more difficult. Some 50,000 triathletes vie for the roughly 2,000 spots in two dozen qualifying races around the world and another 200 entry spots given out by lottery for those mere mortal types in Cmdr. Collins’ mold who want to test themselves against Ironmen.
The triathlon's popularity has exploded since its humble beginning
by Timothy Carlson
Triathlon is a sport practiced by aerobic stalwarts on five continents, solidly entrenched in the Olympics since 2000 and seen by millions of television viewers every year in its ultimate incarnation -- the daunting daylong test called the Ford Ironman World Championship in Hawaii.
The sport’s first stars -- Mark Allen, Dave Scott and Paula Newby -- along with hardy amateurs used the lava fields of Hawaii as proving ground for the ultimate test in human endurance. As images of the courageous caught the public’s imagination, the term Ironman came to be universally recognized as a fundamental unit of measure, its meaning as clear as a mile, located emotionally somewhere beyond the marathon.
Today there are an estimated 3 million triathletes worldwide entranced by the allure of swim-bike-run at various distances. Pros can make hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. There is so much interest in this year's race on Oct. 15, in fact, that Ironmanlive.com will carry a live Web feed of the race.
But just 27 years ago, a tiny field entered the water in Waikiki to embark on the adventure of the first Iron Man, as it was called until being shortened to the one-word "Ironman" in 1981.
The term triathlon was originally used for a now-defunct event at the 1904 Olympics in St. Louis that consisted of a long jump, shot put and 100-yard dash. Then there were two precursors to modern triathlon’s swim-bike-run format. Just after World War I, the Honolulu YMCA had an event it called “Plunge, Pedal and Plod,” a bicycle segment, followed by a run on the beach and finished with a swim. And in 1921, the Petit Perillon swim club in Marseilles, France, held an event called Course des Trois Sports -- a seven-kilometer bike, five-kilometer run and 200-meter out-and-back swim in the Mediterranean.
Flash forward to the running boom of the 1970s, ignited by Frank Shorter’s marathon gold in the Munich Olympics in 1972. On Sept. 25, 1974, the San Diego Track Club Newsletter advertised the first triathlon in the modern sense, a “Run, Cycle, Swim” cross-training event on Fiesta Island. The loosely structured event began with a five-mile bike ride, followed by six miles of running broken up by short swims.
Three of the 46 entrants were enthusiastic representatives of the fitness revolution -- Navy Cmdr. John Collins, his wife Judy and son Michael. In 1977, Collins was stationed on Hawaii, and he and Judy were enjoying the boisterous awards ceremony for the Oahu Perimeter Relay Run. A long-running argument erupted: Who among the swimmers, cyclists and runners was the fittest? Cmdr. Collins was inspired to take the three toughest Hawaiian endurance events -- the 2.4-mile Waikiki Roughwater Swim, the 112 miles of the 115-mile Around Oahu Bike race (originally held over two days), finished off with a 26.2-mile run on the Honolulu Marathon course. “I said the gun will go off at 7 a.m., the clock will keep running, and whoever finishes first we will call the Iron Man,” recalled Collins.
On Feb. 18, 1978, 18 entered, 15 started and 12 finished the event and received trophies handcrafted by Collins himself, appropriately topped by a human figure with a hole in the head. While most in the field hoped they could merely survive, a brutal race broke out between two 2-hour, 30-minute marathoners, former Navy SEAL John Dunbar and a Honolulu taxi driver, former military pentathlete Gordon Haller. When Dunbar ran out of water halfway through the marathon and substituted beer with disastrous consequences, Haller charged ahead and won in 11 hours, 46 minutes, 58 seconds.
The next year, “Sports Illustrated” writer Barry McDermott caught wind of the Iron Man while on assignment in Hawaii. Intrigued, amused and inspired by that year’s winner, Tom Warren, a San Diego tavern owner and former University of Southern California swimmer happily obsessed with self-imposed endurance tests, McDermott wrote a lyrical 10-page feature honoring the race’s wild cast of characters.
The article sparked hundreds of letters to the Collinses, asking for entry information -- plus a request from ABC “Wide World of Sports” to broadcast the 1980 event. When Collins was inevitably assigned back to the mainland, he turned over the race to Valerie Silk, wife of early sponsor Hank Grundman, who ran the Nautilus Fitness Centers in Honolulu. Seeing that the rising number of entries would soon make the Ironman untenable on Honolulu’s narrow roads, Silk scouted out several alternatives before settling on the wide and uncrowded highways through the lava fields of the Kona coast on the Big Island of Hawaii for the 1981 event.
Picked for traffic management and safety, it was fortuitous that the desolate and forbidding beauty of the lava fields and the exhausting challenge of the heat, humidity and 45 mph mumuku winds on the Kona coast gave Ironman Hawaii its signature identity and challenge.
Following the February 1982 Ironman, Silk switched the event to October. It was in that final February race that Cal Poly student Julie Moss found herself the leading woman by 30 minutes after the bike. Untutored in race-day nutrition, Moss hit the wall hard with just a quarter mile to go, wobbling and falling three times like a punch-drunk fighter, then struggling to her feet.
Just 10 yards from the finish line, Moss fell and was unable to get up, so she started to crawl. Ten feet from the line, Kathleen McCartney caught and passed Moss for the win, a moment caught on TV cameras. When the segment ran with heart-tugging flute music and slow motion, the young, freckled-face Moss’ inspiring crawl galvanized the public and even inspired Moss’ future husband, Mark Allen, to take up the sport. (Allen went on to win the Ironman six times.) Moss, an everywoman who proved that ordinary people can dream and accomplish extraordinary things, became the Patron Saint of Digging Deep for thousands of people who flocked to the Ironman.
The year Moss inspired the masses, a set of professional short-course triathlons began and eventually evolved into the current Olympic distance triathlon -- a 1.5-kilometer swim, 40-kilometer bike and 10-kilometer run. These were dominated by Dave Scott, Scott Tinley, Scott Molina and Mark Allen, a group set of tri-heroes known as The Big Four.
By 1989, Canadian Les McDonald led the development of an international governing body called the International Triathlon Union, which held the first official World Championship in Avignon, France, and which fought for and eventually won Olympic acceptance. That same year, Silk sold the rights to the Ironman name and race to James Gills, an amateur Ironman triathlete and Florida ophthalmologist who created a worldwide network of more than two dozen Ironmans, growing the Ironman brand to a multimillion-dollar corporation.
Triathlon growth exploded after the Sydney Olympics in 2000. From that year to today, amateur membership in USA Triathlon grew from 19,000 to more than 60,000, and many more than that compete in one or two local triathlons a year. There are prestigious Ironman races in Canada, Germany, France, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Lanzarote, Australia, New Zealand, Korea, Japan, Brazil, South Korea and South Africa.
Since Gordon Haller finished the first Ironman in just under 12 hours, today’s talented pros have reduced the course record to 8:04:08. The entry fee for Ironman Hawaii has risen from $5 to $450. While the first Ironman offered winner and finishers alike the welded trophy, the top winners today take home $110,000.
And while John and Judy Collins handled all 15 who wanted to compete, now getting into the Ford Ironman World Championship is much more difficult. Some 50,000 triathletes vie for the roughly 2,000 spots in two dozen qualifying races around the world and another 200 entry spots given out by lottery for those mere mortal types in Cmdr. Collins’ mold who want to test themselves against Ironmen.
Thursday, August 04, 2005
Sarah Reinertsen - NEVER GIVE UP
