Half of the people who complete an Ironman cross it off their to-do list and never do it again. The XCers, meanwhile, always seem to be training for the next race, and race weekends are more like a reunion of alpha-achievers — the kind of people who approach an ultra-endurance race like s it was a giant escape room. They become addicted, not only to the challenge, but to solving it together, and then the next goal is not just to finish the race, but to rank high enough to qualify for the Ironman World Championship, which is held every October. in Kailua-Kona on the Big Island of Hawaii. Few words all weekend in Mont-Tremblant will be spoken with more frequency and more subdued reverence than Kona. Qualifying for Kona is like entering Valhalla.
Ironman goes up until 1978, when John and Judy Collins, Hawaiian transplants and avid triathletes, proposed a 140.6-mile, three-stage, swim-bike-run endurance race around the perimeter of Oahu. “Whoever finishes first,” John said, according to the caption, “we’ll call him the Iron Man.” The sport’s turning point came just four years later, in 1982, captured by ABC’s “Wide World of Sports”: a 23-year-old amateur named Julie Moss, who trained for the race at the last minute, leading to the last meters. , mile 140.5 by 140.6, when the muscles in her limbs seized up, she soiled herself and collapsed to the ground. She kept staggering to her feet, kept collapsing, then finally crawled to the finish line and touched her in second place. Thousands of viewers witnessed this on ABC and said, “Sign me up.”
Ironman XC began in 2009, or more accurately, it was rebooted and renamed from a program called CEO Challenge, Ironman’s original attempt to capitalize on the growing interest of the executive class in the sport. Since then, the parent company has flourished, creating new categories, subsuming established distance races, and hosting multiple events every weekend all over the world. (Advance Publications, owner of Condé Nast, bought the Ironman Group in 2020 for $730 million.) During the same period, effective leadership underwent a similar overhaul to Ironman itself, a shift from the original metaphor – unyielding, unstoppable, indestructible – to a kind of radical mind-body balance, the seemingly paradoxical notion that the right kind of not working holds the key to improving your work. Take sleep, which was once reserved for the limp and the weak, a thing the lazy did while the masters of the universe were busy crushing it around the clock.” Lack of sleep was once a sign of tenacity in high achievers,” says Dixon. “Now that’s a badge of stupidity. Every high-performing CEO I work with prioritizes sleep. Each. I don’t work with a CEO who doesn’t sleep at least seven hours a night.
Ironman is nobody’s idea of a spectator sport, and there’s not much XC hosts can do about it, but without proper guidance it can be miserable, like chasing mirages in a desert. So, as race day dawns, Ford’s attention shifts to the XC families. It helps turn one of the loneliest, most energy-consuming and highest-priority sports activities into a family vacation. The XC treatment, in fact, was the main reason Le Jamtel’s wife and son followed.
At 6:15 a.m., well after the athletes had left to inspect their bikes, Ford escorted the XC families around the lake to a VIP cabana on the beach for a quick last date with their loved ones. On a thin patch of sand outside, the rest of the Ironman field stood there, shaking their limbs and waiting – 2,000 sickening warriors in black jumpsuits, preparing to charge into the water through a giant inflatable arch presented by Subaru, like a reverse amphibious assault in Normandy.
Minutes before the opening howitzer exploded, Ford led the XC VIPs through a special lane, past a small spectator enclosure, past the sound tower and onto a gray spatula-shaped pontoon that winds down extended 100 feet into the water, where they joined approximately 20 Ironman officials and former champions and race photographers. This may be the only good angle from which to watch an Ironman begin, which is a shame because so few people can enjoy it, and what a sight. The morning sky like blue lacquer on porcelain, the lake breeze and a few feet away the crash of dozens of runners ripping through the water.
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