Kona 2026: The Price of Racing Sensibly

In 2022, Sam Laidlow arrived in T2 at the IRONMAN World Championship more than six minutes ahead of Gustav Iden. He had just ridden 180 kilometres in 4:04:36, breaking the Kona bike course record at 23 years old. He had taken a race full of exceptional endurance athletes and made every one of them deal with him.

Iden won. Laidlow finished second.

Two years later, Laidlow rode even faster. His 3:57:22 was the first sub-four-hour bike split in the men’s Kona World Championship. He reached T2 around nine minutes ahead of Patrick Lange. Laidlow eventually finished eighteenth. Lange won in a course-record 7:35:53, running the marathon in 2:37:34.

You can turn those two races into a very straightforward lesson. Don’t overbike. Save your legs. Run the marathon. The sensible athlete eventually collects the people who have been showing off for five hours.

It’s a reassuring interpretation. It isn’t necessarily a very good one.

Laidlow’s 2022 ride came close to winning the race. In 2024, he again tried to use the strongest part of his performance to put the others in difficulty. We cannot know what would have happened had he ridden with the group instead. We can be fairly certain that Gustav Iden and Patrick Lange were not going to become worse runners simply because Laidlow decided to behave himself on the bike.

What bothers me is how quickly we decide whether an athlete made a good choice once we have seen the finishing position. An attack that succeeds is called courageous. When the same approach fails, the athlete suddenly lacked discipline. The decision has been judged by a result that was not available when it had to be made.

Kona 2026 brings the men and women back to the island on the same day, and with them comes another opportunity to watch this argument play out. I am interested in the winners, naturally. But what interests me more as a coach is the moment an athlete has to decide whether the plan is still serving the race.

Because there is such a thing as racing too sensibly.

01 | Patience Has a Price

Long-course triathlon has developed a particular affection for restraint. Protect the marathon. Stay inside your power targets. Let other people get carried away. If somebody comes past too quickly, wish them luck and collect them later.

Most age-group triathletes need to hear some version of that advice. Anyone who has stood beside a transition area in the first hour of an IRONMAN knows how much energy gets spent on arguments that the athlete cannot possibly win. An overtake becomes a personal insult. A rider who was going to hold 190 watts is suddenly producing 240 because somebody with the same age-group marking has appeared alongside them.

But we have gone from teaching athletes to avoid stupid decisions to treating any departure from the pacing plan as a mistake.

They are not the same thing.

Suppose an athlete reaches the final hour of the bike in unusually good shape. The training has gone well, fuelling is working, and the effort has remained controlled. A competitor ahead begins to fade. A short, deliberate increase in effort could create a gap before the marathon.

Should the athlete take it?

There is no universal answer. We need to know the athlete, the likely cost of the move, the conditions and what is actually at stake. But I would be uneasy with a coach whose answer is automatically no because the original plan did not include it.

Staying exactly on target is a decision, too. It can be the right one. It can also mean passing up the best opportunity of the day. We rarely describe that as a tactical risk because it looks so respectable in the training file.

A power target is meant to help an athlete race. The race is not being held to validate a power target.

02 | What an Attack Really Costs

I am not proposing that everybody turns off their bike computer at kilometre thirty and goes hunting. There is a reason IRONMAN rewards athletes who can control themselves. A few minutes of excessive effort can produce a much larger bill later in the day, particularly when heat, fuelling and muscular fatigue are already working against you.

The problem is that the cost is individual.

One athlete can ride a short, demanding section, settle back to race effort, continue eating and run normally off the bike. Another will spend the next forty minutes trying to recover, lose the ability to fuel comfortably and arrive at T2 with legs that have already begun to shut down. Average power may make their rides look similar. Their marathons will not.

I want an athlete to have experienced the demands they may encounter in a race before they are asked to make that decision. A hard section late in a long ride, followed by a return to controlled effort. Enough riding afterwards to establish whether the body genuinely settles. Sometimes a run off the bike, not to produce an impressive split, but to see whether the stride and breathing are still there.

This is not an invitation to destroy every Saturday session. It is a reason to include race-specific variation when the athlete is ready for it. Training should establish what is affordable. If the athlete has never tested a surge after three hours, they are guessing when they do it at Kona.

I have seen too many athletes who are beautifully prepared to ride at one steady number but have no experience responding when the terrain, weather or other athletes interrupt that rhythm. They know their functional threshold power to the nearest watt. They are much less certain about what the last thirty minutes of a difficult ride should feel like.

The real preparation is building that understanding. What happens to your breathing when the effort rises? How quickly does it settle? Can you still eat? Does your pedalling remain effective when the muscular fatigue arrives? What does the first kilometre of running feel like afterwards?

An intelligent attack comes from answers to those questions. The athlete who chases a rival simply because they cannot bear to be passed is making a very different decision.

03 | Thirty-Five Seconds

Last year’s women’s race offered another useful example, and it is more difficult to turn into a neat pacing lesson.

Solveig Løvseth won Kona in 8:28:27. Kat Matthews finished second in 8:29:02. Thirty-five seconds separated them after more than eight hours of racing. Matthews had run a 2:47:23 marathon, a new women’s Kona run course record, to get that close.

Løvseth made a decisive contribution to her victory on the bike. She came out of the water behind Lucy Charles-Barclay, rode her way forward and created the advantage she needed to survive Matthews’ exceptional marathon. Matthews took a different route through the race and came within half a minute of catching her.

The temptation is to find those thirty-five seconds retrospectively. Could Matthews have responded to Løvseth earlier? Could she have ridden a little harder? Did she leave the title on the bike?

Perhaps. Or perhaps responding would have compromised the run that made the finish so close. Thirty-five seconds at the finish does not mean the same thirty-five seconds were sitting freely available somewhere on the course.

Nor does Løvseth’s win prove that everyone should attack. Her bike performance worked because she sustained enough of the advantage afterwards. Had she run into trouble, the very same ride would probably have been described as overambitious.

I find both performances impressive. More importantly, I find the uncertainty useful. These were athletes at the top of the sport, making real decisions under pressure with no knowledge of the result. Their coaches could prepare them, but they could not remove the judgement that racing required.

Lucy Charles-Barclay and Taylor Knibb, both prominent early in the race, eventually withdrew during the marathon. Those withdrawals changed the race dramatically. They do not permit those of us watching from a distance to diagnose exactly what went wrong from a split sheet or a camera shot. It is possible to analyse tactics without pretending to know an athlete’s medical condition or their experience of the day.

The closer I look at this race, the less interested I am in announcing the one correct strategy. There were several credible ways to try to win it. Only one could succeed.

04 | The Coach’s Comfortable Answer

There is professional safety in conservative advice.

Tell an athlete to hold back and the instruction is easy to defend. We all know the importance of pacing an IRONMAN. We all know how many athletes ruin their marathons on the bike. If they finish strongly, the advice looks excellent. If they lose touch with their competitors, well, at least they executed the plan.

Tell somebody to take a calculated risk and the conversation afterwards may be less comfortable.

This does not mean I want coaches to prescribe attacks to look brave. I want us to be prepared to explain why holding back is right for one athlete and an unnecessary restriction for another. A first-time finisher, a Kona age-group podium contender and a professional trying to win the world title have different reasons for being on the course. Giving all three the same definition of sensible racing is lazy coaching.

My own coaching became clearer through the time I spent working with Brett Sutton in the Trisutto Coach the Coach programme. For years before that, I had coached alongside another career and raced distances from sprint to full IRONMAN. The recurring problem was not a shortage of available training data. It was the gap between what athletes could produce in training and what held together on race day.

I saw swimmers with excellent drills whose strokes deteriorated once they were tired. Cyclists capable of attractive numbers on the trainer who lost their pedalling effectiveness after several hours. Runners with plenty of easy mileage who lacked the muscular durability to use their aerobic fitness late in a race.

Sutton gave me a more complete framework for things I had already noticed. Prepare the body for the demands it will actually encounter. Build the capacity to keep working effectively when fatigue changes the task. Do not confuse a tidy session with useful preparation.

That experience did not make me less interested in physiology. It made me less willing to let a physiological number stand in for the whole athlete.

I still use power, pace and heart rate. I want them to be accurate, and I want to understand the trends. But I also want an athlete who can describe their effort, recognise when their movement is changing and act without somebody speaking into their ear. As I wrote in the piece about what a coach owes an athlete, the aim should be independence. I will not be on the Queen K when a rival makes a move.

05 | The Athlete Who Turns the Screen Away

A small incident at Challenge Roth earlier this year has stayed with me.

Alanis Siffert was racing at the front when she saw a power reading higher than expected. She had caught Lucy Charles-Barclay earlier than anticipated, felt strong and was riding well. Rather than spend the rest of the bike leg negotiating with the number, she switched her Garmin to the navigation screen. She went on to win, riding 4:29:19 and running 2:45:00.

I wrote about Siffert’s Roth victory because I recognised something in that decision. She is coached by Sutton, and the principle is familiar to me: the athlete has to learn to read effort from the inside. That does not mean that Siffert was guessing. It means her preparation gave her a reference that was more useful in that moment than the number on the computer.

Imagine an age-grouper copying the visible part of that story. They hear that a professional ignored her power meter, hide their own screen at the beginning of an IRONMAN and ride on excitement for five hours. By the marathon they have discovered the difference between trusting your sensations and mistaking adrenaline for fitness.

Siffert’s decision is interesting because of the years of training underneath it, not because of the button she pressed.

This is the problem with much of the professional advice that filters down to age-group sport. We copy the part we can see. The frequency of the sessions, the carbohydrate intake, the bike setup, the fearless looking race tactics. We cannot see the history of adaptation, the recovery available between sessions or the individual feedback that made those choices appropriate.

I have written elsewhere about why you shouldn’t simply train like the Norwegians. The Norwegian system is effective in a context built around it. That doesn’t make a double-threshold day suitable for somebody with a full-time job and a broken night’s sleep. The same logic applies on race day. You can admire an elite athlete’s aggression without possessing the preparation to reproduce it.

06 | Kona Doesn’t Price Effort Fairly

The Kona course is familiar. The demands are not mysterious. Athletes swim in Kailua Bay, ride through exposed terrain towards Hawi and return to run a marathon that offers very little shelter from the conditions. You can explore the specific course in the Kona Race Intelligence dossier.

Familiarity should not be confused with control.

Heat changes the cost of exercise. A sustainable training power in cool weather may produce a much greater cardiovascular strain under the Hawaiian sun. Winds make speed a poor guide to how hard the athlete should be working. By the time someone is running on the Queen Ka’ahumanu Highway, they are dealing with the consequences of hours of decisions made in conditions that may have changed several times.

This is why good racing sometimes looks like doing very little. Holding back on the early bike while others react to every overtake can be a positive tactical choice. Taking a bottle without losing concentration can matter more than finding a faster line through a corner. Backing off when the body is showing signs that the heat is becoming unmanageable can save the remainder of the day, and sometimes it is a matter of safety rather than performance.

But it works in the other direction as well. If an athlete has held back appropriately, fuelled properly and reaches the final ten kilometres of the marathon in unexpectedly good condition, I don’t want them guarding the pace prediction as though it were a legal contract. Race the kilometres that remain.

The difficult part is distinguishing ordinary, manageable discomfort from genuine physiological trouble. No coach should encourage an athlete to push through confusion, loss of coordination or signs of heat illness. The mythology of the suffering hero has already done enough damage to the sport. Good judgement includes knowing when the race needs to stop.

07 | What I Want From Saturday

The professional men and women race together in Kona on Saturday 10 October for the first time since 2019. It is a welcome return to a single championship day, but the interesting part for me is the collection of very different ways the front of the field could race.

Laidlow arrives after winning Roth this year, with another demonstration of what he can do when his bike strength is turned into a complete race. Iden and Kristian Blummenfelt bring the formidable depth of the Norwegian system. Lange returns as a three-time champion, expected to make his final professional appearance at Kona. Magnus Ditlev and Marten Van Riel add other ways the bike race could develop. Defending champion Casper Stornes is missing after a training crash on the island.

On the women’s side, Løvseth defends her title against Matthews, Laura Philipp, Lucy Charles-Barclay and Taylor Knibb, among others. Knibb arrives fresh from winning the 70.3 world title in Nice. None of those athletes needs a made-up prediction from me to make the race interesting.

I want to see who makes the first meaningful move, who chooses not to follow, and whether those decisions were based on what their bodies could afford or what the people around them were doing.

A spectacular bike split tells us something about an athlete. What happens in the first ten kilometres of the marathon tells us something else. I find the relationship between the two far more interesting than either number by itself.

And I want to be careful about the stories we tell once the winner is known. We will be tempted to explain that winner’s strategy as though it was obviously the right one from the beginning. A different wind direction, an untimely stomach problem or one rival having an unexpectedly good day could have changed the result without making the original decision stupid.

A finish line can tell us who won. It cannot reconstruct all the information available when each decision was made.

08 | We Are Spending Money to Avoid the Harder Work

While the professionals race, a great many age-group athletes will be watching and making notes. Some of those notes will be useful. Others will become purchases.

I am not against aerodynamic improvements, good equipment or properly researched nutrition. At professional speeds, marginal differences genuinely matter. My objection is to the order in which ambitious amateur athletes tend to approach the problem.

They may spend weeks comparing helmets, tyres and ceramic bearings, yet never practise what happens when their planned bike effort is interrupted. They can describe the carbohydrate concentration in their bottles to a decimal place, but have never established whether they can keep drinking when their stomach begins to protest in the heat. They can calculate predicted splits and still start the marathon at a pace they have not once sustained off a long ride.

A bottle that saves a handful of seconds is worth having if the foundations are already there. If the athlete fails to drink from it because they never rehearsed fuelling under fatigue, we have optimised the wrong part of the performance.

I made a similar case in Marginal Gains in Triathlon: A Costly Myth. The products are tangible, immediate and pleasant to research. The alternative is months of consistent work, and an honest examination of why your race performances have been falling short of your training.

For the age-grouper with eight or ten hours a week, the last five watts of aerodynamic advantage rarely deserve the attention that basic execution still needs. You can race very well with equipment that isn’t quite perfect. It is much harder to race well with judgement that has never been trained.

09 | The Responsibility I Take Personally

When I write a race plan, I want it to give an athlete clarity, not dependency. I want them to know what their early restraint is protecting. I want them to understand which kinds of extra effort they have prepared for and which ones will probably cost too much. Above all, I want them to recognise when the race is asking for a decision that cannot be made by consulting the original spreadsheet.

There will be athletes who should stick to the plan almost regardless of what is happening around them. There will be others for whom a calculated risk is part of the only realistic route to their goal. Good coaching should be capable of telling them apart without turning either one into a moral virtue.

I don’t want every athlete I coach to be aggressive. I want every athlete I coach to know what they are doing.

That is what I will be thinking about when Kona unfolds on Saturday. Not who has the cleanest pacing file, nor who provides the most dramatic television pictures. I will be looking for the athlete who recognises the price of a decision and understands when it is worth paying.

Sometimes that means letting the others go. Sometimes it means going yourself.

Kona is behind us now. I revisited these questions in the post-race piece on Luis, Knibb and the decisions that mattered.

If you’re preparing for an IRONMAN and want that judgement to be part of the training rather than something left to chance on race morning, this is how I coach. I’ll tell you when to hold back. I’ll also tell you when you’ve earned the right to race.

If you want these decisions made with you, coaching is the place to start. If you prefer to work independently, explore the training plans.