#81: Almost 120 pros at Oceanside?
But who's not there.
issue #81: April 3, 2024
Presented by:
All-sporters, I had been thinking about driving all the way down to Oceanside, but California is long and it’s actually nine hours in the car — and I need to get in my last big 100K test run, too. (While I’ve never been a big user of salt pills, I talked it through with the crew at Precision and have found that the 250mg electrolyte pills with water actually often resolve any GI/sloshing issues I’m having — here’s a little about why — so I want to test all of that and all of my gear one last time.)
Which means I’ll just be watching the race broadcast, in between all the basketball games. So much basketball this past weekend!
A big thanks to everyone who read our Book Club book, ‘What Made Maddy Run', sent in questions, or joined us for our chat with the author last week. I’ll be sending out the Q&A in the next week or two.
Now, this week it’s all about Oceanside, the new Pro Series, and the drama.
- Kelly
Let’s start with a recap of the Ironman Pro Series basics
I’ll admit: When Ironman told me they were going to launch their own pro series, I laughed and laughed. But who’s laughing now.
Yes, sure, it’s absolutely a play against the PTO, regardless of what anyone says. Yes, Ironman was worried they’d lose too many of their big name pros, and there was a need to capitalize on renewed interest in the front of the field in order to maintain the prestige of their events. I didn’t know if it’d work or if it’d really attract a lot of athletes — I WAS WRONG.
The defining feature now seems to be (for better & worse, more on that in a second) that anyone with a pro license can have a go. Why not, this isn’t the PTO. (Kidding, not kidding.)
The details
The series includes 20 of their existing 70.3 & full races (list here)
Those races earn athletes points to the overall series title
Your five best results count to your points total
140.6 wins are worth 5,000 points & 70.3 wins are worth 2,500 points
Points decrease by the amount of time you are behind the winner
Points details here
Each of the races still have the ~prize money they did before (more or less) for $2.5M across the 20 events. But now theres then an additional $1.7M for the series-end bonus — winner takes $200K, 11th to 50th take home $5,000.
The races will all be broadcast, too
All of that starts this weekend at Oceanside 70.3 *palm tree emoji, surfing emoji, sun, except actually this race is always really cold just fyi*
The good
Kudos to Ironman for actually putting some marketing effort behind this. I thought they might just throw a new logo on a handful of events and call it a day. But, last week, they launched a trailer and new website with bios & results for every athlete (and we mean every! athlete).
The website does have quite a lot of bugs — like don’t try to click on ‘how to watch,’ many of the buttons don’t work — but, hey, they got all of this rolled out since the end of October.
Now, for the not-so-good…
Start lists are being declared full & abruptly closed, and athletes are getting boxed out
A couple of weeks ago when I mentioned that the start list for Oceanside 70.3 had closed early, I sorta thought it was just funny. Oceanside often has 50 or 60 men lining up, so shutting that down prematurely has some precedent and I figured it was simply an oddity.
But now at least three other races (Texas, St. George, Mallorca) have closed down pro registration without warning.
I’ve also had it confirmed from athletes that at least a couple of big names went to register for Ironman Texas weeks ahead of the registration deadline and were told: Nope, it’s full.
This is not good.
If you don’t know how it works: The Ironman pro calendar lists all the races for the year with registration deadlines for each event. As a pro, you email in and are given a registration link. There has always been a caveat that an event could fill and close before the deadline — but this has rarely been an issue (and, typically, has only been the case when a race’s field size was artificially limited because of the location, which was usually noted ahead of time).
Look, Ironman can run pro start lists however it wants. The same way the PTO can invite whoever they want. And I’m guessing they simply didn’t expect this level of demand. I’ll be honest: I didn’t see this coming either.
I guess you could say this is a good problem to have, but the pros are understandably freaking out because:
Athletes who expected to register up to a certain date are being told they’re too late even two or three weeks before that date
At least a couple of these athletes are definitely big names who were planning on these events and who should be allowed to race — and whom I’m sure Ironman would prefer to see racing
Ironman has now told athletes that what they’ll do (as a compromise) is designate when a race is getting close to filling
BUT (!) the obvious problem is this creates every incentive to just put your name down on lists even if you aren’t sure or aren’t likely to start because, hell, if you don’t you might get screwed
Ironman has backed itself into a corner here
IMO, the solution is actually quite simple — not saying it’s easy, but it is simple:
Tell athletes to put their name down by xx date and stick to that date
Then fill out the start by yy date with the top 50-60 athletes from that list (yes, you’d have to have a ranking system, but if only there rankings that already existed…)
If an athlete on the list notifies they won’t be starting, roll it down to the next person
If an athlete is a DNS but doesn’t notify/pull out ahead of time, some kind of simple penalty and/or public shaming
Problem solved.
Now, what do you think is actually going to happen?
Speaking of Oceanside 70.3
But! I’m not racing pro anymore! So I just get to watch this — and there’s going to be some good racing to watch.
There are 40 women on the start list this weekend and 78 men! There are a couple of world champions, at least four previous champions here, some people who are trying to compete in both the T100 & the IM Pro Series, and some athletes who are making the most of a chance to maybe earn some extra cash.
HOW TO WATCH: Saturday, April 6 @ 6:40 a.m. PT/9:40 a.m. ET - the race airs (in the U.S. & Canada) LIVE for FREE on Outside Watch w/ replay only for Outside+ members & airs globally at proseries.ironman.com
NOTE: There *will* be Gatorade on course. Despite whatever rumors you’ve heard otherwise, there will be Gatorade at Oceanside and Texas. (We talked about it on the podcast.)
Best of the rest
World Triathlon Indoor Cup - Lievin: It was the first World Cup indoors and you can see extended highlights of the wildness on Youtube now. Laura Lindemann and Vetle Thorn won — and Gwen Jorgensen locked down her spot for Yokohama.
Here’s what else is coming up this month (in case you don’t have our Big Calendar):
April 12: Supertri E World Champs
April 13: PTO T100 - Singapore
April 20: World Tri World Cup - Wollogong
April 27: Ironman Texas
April 27: XTERRA World Cup - Greece
If you didn’t check out Precision Fuel & Hydration’s case study of me from my 50K DNF, you can see it here. I suppose you learn more from the case studies of the ones that go badly — and that’s why I’m here for you — but you can also see the case studies of the other people who did not screw up like me: For example, Ellie Salthouse’s win at Geelong 70.3 a couple of weeks ago.
The -ish
The rest of the news you should know about from our sports this week.
The Cross Country World Champs were this past weekend — Kenya took the top five spots in the women’s race and three of the top five in the men’s race. I didn’t realize Belgrade had this kind of mud and terrain. But, best story of the weekend is this piece on Weini Kelati. (Olympics/Instagram/Outside Run)
And, OK, after I hated on the Speed Project last weekend, I’ll admit: I did enjoy this group of Tarahumara women running from L.A. to Vegas. (Instagram)
Also. While, yes, I have concerns about teenagers being pushed to extremes, I think if they have big goals and are pushing those goals themselves then I’m not going to stop them: like this 12-year-old marathoner or the new high school girl’s 5,000m record (15:25.27). (Instagram/Citius)
You will not be shocked to hear there’s a battle over school fitness tests. (Outside)
Athletes are sharing stories of getting sick at the World Cup in Hong Kong two weeks ago. We talked about it, too, on the podcast. (Instagram)
The first nine mixed relay teams are confirmed for the Olympics. (World Triathlon)
Pontevedra will host the World Tri Multisport Champs again in 2025. (World Triathlon)
I enjoy Morgan Pearson (and I think he has the potential for star power), and Chelsea’s new episode with him is worth a listen. (Instagram/Apple Podcast)
India Lee and Kat Matthews are both doing aero-testing according to IG. And Ruth Astle made a Youtube Nice recon video in case you’re curious about that descent. (Instagram/Youtube)
Paris-Roubaix is this weekend and the recon verdict: cobbles like you’ve never seen. (CyclingWeekly)
This was very confusing a couple weeks ago, for those of us not deep in the mountain biking world: Women had their first-ever Crankworx Slopestyle world championship event — but, the men’s competition didn’t go off because the male riders boycotted over concerns about conditions, safety, travel compensation, and pay. I’m pretty much always going to side with athletes boycotting and they were probably right, but you also have to assume those unsafe conditions were the same for the women, it’s just that the women didn’t have as much of a choice here. (Crankworx/PinkBike)
Who’s actually making money these days in the cycling industry? (PinkBike)
The Boston Tri also adopted a policy letting athletes transfer their entry to someone else or defer to another year. And I’m telling you, I think this is the future of races. (Endurance.biz)
SuperTri is going to have Arabic commentary now. If you’re curious how their broadcast works behind-the-scenes, we talked to the team a year ago. (SuperTri/Triathlonish)
Triathlete had a fun story about the old Ironman World Series — ah, how things change but stay the same. (Triathlete)
Paris is trying to become mosquito-free by this summer. Which is only slightly less difficult than the other challenges the city faces. (Inside the Games)
At least they have a waiter croissant race. (New York Times)
One last thing
On the upside, in downhill skateboarding the crazy helmets sorta make sense.
Don’t forget: You can get 15% off Precision Fuel & Hydration here.
What I learned this week from your newsletter is that Scott Tinley is a college professor with a PhD 😆