Kona 2026: The Problem With Knowing Better on Sunday

Writing about Kona before Kona is a slightly irritating thing to do to yourself. On Friday, I published The Price of Racing Sensibly, arguing that we have become rather too fond of conservative racing advice. Stay within your power targets, protect your marathon, and let everybody else make the mistakes. It sounds perfectly reasonable, which is partly why I find it troublesome.

I used Sam Laidlow’s 2022 and 2024 races as examples. In 2022, his aggressive cycling brought him within reach of a world title. Two years later, an even faster ride ended with an eighteenth-place finish. The approach was similar, but our interpretation of it changed considerably once we knew the result.

My point was that a race decision deserves to be judged by what the athlete knew when making it, rather than by the finishing position we discover several hours later.

Then Saturday happened.

Vincent Luis, making his Kona debut at 37, won the men’s title in 7:47:27 after catching Magnus Ditlev late in the marathon. Gustav Iden finished second, Matthew Marquardt third. In the women’s race, Taylor Knibb won in 8:36:29 after a remarkable reversal of last year’s events. Defending champion Solveig Løvseth had overtaken her late in the marathon, only to suffer a distressing collapse near the finish. Laura Philipp and Julie Derron completed the podium.

If you wanted evidence that patience wins IRONMAN races, you could certainly find it in those results. You could probably put together a convincing presentation, complete with power curves and reassuring conclusions about the importance of controlled pacing.

I would be rather more careful.

01 | Magnus Ditlev Deserved His Chance

I have a certain sympathy for Ditlev, and not simply because of how his race ended.

He arrived at Kona with one of the strongest bike legs in the sport, knowing that several of his competitors were exceptional marathon runners. There is nothing particularly sophisticated about telling an athlete like that to hold back and save something for the run. The difficulty is deciding how much he could afford to save while still giving himself a realistic chance of winning.

Ditlev took the lead on the bike, recorded the fastest split of the day and arrived in T2 about five and a half minutes ahead of Luis. He was not finished building that advantage, either. For much of the marathon, he remained far enough ahead to look like the likely winner.

Then, coming out of the Energy Lab, things began to deteriorate. His running became increasingly difficult, he began walking, and Luis passed him with fewer than eight kilometres remaining.

I can already imagine the conversation about that bike split. It must have been too much, otherwise he would have kept running. He should have conserved more energy. He threw away the win.

Perhaps. I would certainly want to examine the bike effort, his fuelling, the reported trouble with his hydration system and what happened physically during the final part of the marathon. But I would hesitate to declare that Ditlev made a fundamental tactical mistake. He was trying to win against runners who might well have beaten him had he reached T2 alongside them.

There is something frustrating about the ease with which we retrospectively identify the point where an athlete should have behaved differently. We have the benefit of knowing precisely what happened afterwards. Ditlev did not.

And I wonder whether we would be having the same conversation had he held on for another eight kilometres and won. I suspect we would instead be celebrating the courage of a man who understood his strengths and refused to let the better runners dictate his race.

Both interpretations are too convenient for my liking.

02 | A Different Kind of Experience

Luis, meanwhile, produced a performance I thoroughly enjoyed studying.

He was not the strongest cyclist on Saturday and he did not run the fastest marathon. What he did was put together a race that allowed him to remain competitive throughout the day and increase his effort when the opportunity presented itself.

There is something particularly appealing about the fact that he did this in what he had planned to be the final race of a career spent predominantly in short-course triathlon. At 37, after twenty years of elite competition, he was hardly the obvious candidate for a debut Kona victory.

Yet I don’t find his success entirely surprising. The endurance demands of long-course racing may be different, but Luis brought an extraordinary amount of racing experience with him. He had spent years making decisions under pressure, responding to other athletes, judging whether an acceleration was affordable and recognising when the situation required something different from the original plan.

His ability to use that experience late in the marathon is what interests me.

Luis undoubtedly has exceptional physiology. But years of short-course racing also gave him practice reading a race and deciding when to act. That kind of judgement is hard to capture in a training file, and harder still to prescribe as a target on a watch.

That is worth remembering when we tell age-group athletes that the safest approach is simply to follow the numbers.

03 | Taylor Knibb Learned Something the Hard Way

The women’s race was more difficult to watch, particularly towards the end.

Knibb’s return to Kona was already an interesting story. Last year she had been in a position to win before her race came apart late in the marathon. Løvseth went on to take the title, holding off Kat Matthews by just 35 seconds.

This year Knibb was again outstanding on the bike. She came out of the water behind Lucy Charles-Barclay, moved to the front and rode 4:40:07, building a lead of more than three minutes by T2. For a while, the question seemed to be whether she had learned enough from last year’s experience to sustain her advantage all the way to the finish.

But Løvseth was coming.

As the marathon progressed, Knibb’s running became increasingly difficult. Løvseth eventually caught her with around eight kilometres remaining and moved into the lead. The Norwegian looked to be on her way to a second consecutive world title.

Knibb, however, had made a decision.

In her post-race interview, she explained that she had reached the Energy Lab and decided she needed to look after herself. When Løvseth passed her, she recognised that attempting to fight the move could bring about a repeat of last year’s collapse. She concentrated on reaching the finish.

I can imagine how unpleasant that decision must have been.

After months of preparation, an outstanding bike performance and hours at the front of the World Championship, she had to allow another athlete to run away with the title. She knew what was happening. She knew what she stood to lose. And she made a judgement based on what her own body was telling her.

Then, with the finish approaching, Løvseth began to stumble and fell repeatedly. Knibb passed her to regain the lead and went on to win. Løvseth eventually made it across the line in eighth place.

I was pleased for Knibb. Coming back from last year’s experience and winning the World Championship is a tremendous achievement, and she had to race exceptionally well to put herself in that position.

But I am hesitant to say that the result proves her decision was correct.

Suppose Løvseth had run the final kilometre without incident. Knibb would likely have finished second. The decision to protect herself rather than attempt an acceleration she did not believe she could sustain would have been exactly the same.

Would we have admired it quite so much? I hope so. I’m not entirely convinced we would.

This is something I think about in my own coaching. Athletes are understandably attached to outcomes. They train for months with a particular race and a particular goal in mind. When the opportunity to achieve it begins to disappear, accepting that the body cannot deliver what the mind wants is a difficult thing to ask.

Sometimes the athlete needs encouragement to continue working through ordinary discomfort. Sometimes they need to hear that the sensible decision is to reduce the effort, even when doing so means letting go of a result they desperately want.

Knowing when to give which advice is part of the job, and one of the reasons a race plan can never cover everything.

04 | The Part of the Race I Cannot Celebrate

Løvseth’s final kilometres also brought me back to something I wrote earlier this year.

In The Myth of the Bleeding Hero, I described watching Chrissie Wellington win Kona in 2011 on a rather unreliable livestream. I was a younger athlete then, and I had bought into the idea that the ability to withstand suffering was one of the defining qualities of a great endurance athlete.

Wellington had arrived at that race carrying injuries from a serious training accident. Her victory was extraordinary, and at the time I admired the willingness to push through what seemed almost impossible.

I see that performance somewhat differently now.

I still admire Wellington enormously. But I have spent enough years racing and coaching to become much less comfortable with the idea that overriding physical warning signs is something athletes should aspire to.

That is why I found Løvseth’s finish troubling.

She had raced superbly. Recovering from a difficult swim, working her way into contention and eventually taking the lead from Knibb was a remarkable performance. Whatever happened in the closing stages does not erase the quality of the preceding eight hours.

But seeing an athlete lose coordination, fall repeatedly and struggle to stand is not something I can watch with the uncomplicated enthusiasm that endurance sport sometimes reserves for displays of extreme determination.

I don’t know precisely what happened medically, and I have no intention of diagnosing it from television footage. Severe loss of coordination and repeated collapse demand immediate medical attention, not a motivational interpretation.

I have changed my mind about this over the years. Perhaps that is simply what happens when you spend enough time seeing the consequences of athletes confusing determination with good judgement.

I want the athletes I coach to be tough. I want them to be capable of sustained, uncomfortable work, and I am not especially interested in making training easier for the sake of keeping everybody happy.

But I also want them to understand their limits. More importantly, I want them to recognise the difference between a limit that can be trained and a warning that needs to be respected. The two should never be confused.

05 | Training for the Decisions That Matter

When I look at these performances, I think about the athletes I work with who have relatively little training time available. Most are balancing training with jobs and families. They cannot dedicate twenty or thirty hours a week to building every conceivable performance advantage, nor should they need to.

I have had athletes arrive with years of training data and remarkably little confidence in their own ability to judge effort. One came to me six weeks before a 70.3 after nine months with another coach. His training files looked perfectly reasonable, but when I asked what his race execution had felt like during training, he couldn’t really tell me. He had become very good at completing the prescribed work without developing much understanding of what it was supposed to feel like.

There is a problem with that, because I cannot stand beside an athlete on the Queen K and tell them whether a surge is worth following. Nor can I decide for them whether an unexpectedly difficult patch during the marathon is something to work through or a sign that the day’s plan needs revising. The Kona course itself gives those decisions plenty of opportunities to arise.

This is where the work I do with athletes becomes quite specific. We develop muscular endurance so that swimming, pedalling and running remain effective when fatigue accumulates. We practise effort changes within longer sessions and examine how the body responds afterwards. We use power and pace to check whether the athlete’s perception of effort is becoming more accurate, rather than assuming that hitting a prescribed number is the same as learning to race.

There is also an element of honesty required from both coach and athlete. A session completed at the correct watts may have felt substantially harder than the previous week’s equivalent. That matters. An athlete who reports only that they hit their targets is leaving out information I need to coach them properly.

I would rather hear that an athlete struggled to maintain their usual breathing or felt their pedalling deteriorate late in a session. That gives us something useful to work with. It is less impressive than a beautifully executed training file, perhaps, but I have seen enough beautifully executed training files fail to produce the expected race result.

06 | I’m Still Thinking About Saturday

I haven’t come away from Kona believing that Ditlev should have been less ambitious. I also haven’t decided that his approach was correct and merely unlucky. The race leaves questions worth examining, and I would like to know more about what happened before reaching a conclusion.

I admire Luis for the quality of his performance and the experience he brought to it. I admire Knibb for returning to Kona and having the presence of mind to make a difficult decision when the world title appeared to be slipping away. And I feel for Løvseth, whose outstanding performance ended in circumstances nobody would have wanted to see.

I also find myself thinking about how differently we might be discussing all three had a few things happened differently in the final kilometres.

Before Kona, I wrote that I didn’t want every athlete I coach to be aggressive. I wanted them to know what they were doing. I still think that is about as close as I can get to describing what good coaching should achieve.

It isn’t an especially marketable promise. There are easier things to sell than judgement developed through years of consistent training. A new gadget has the advantage of arriving in a box, while learning to recognise an unsustainable effort is something you discover gradually, usually during sessions that nobody will ever find particularly interesting.

But that is where I have seen the most meaningful improvements in athletes. Better physical preparation, certainly, but also a growing understanding of what they are capable of and how to use it. Athletes who can make decisions without becoming prisoners of the numbers or the emotions of the moment.

For Ditlev, taking a risk may have been entirely sensible. For Knibb, letting Løvseth go was probably the most sensible decision she could make. Both were trying to achieve the best possible result with what they had available.

Their circumstances were different. So were their decisions.

That’s a much more useful starting point for coaching than deciding, on Sunday morning, that the winner has shown everybody the correct way to race.

If you’re preparing for an IRONMAN, my approach to coaching begins with understanding what you can realistically achieve, what your training needs to develop and how you can make the best use of it on race day. I will happily tell you when I think you are doing too much. I will also tell you when I think you are holding yourself back.

And I hope that, eventually, you’ll be able to tell the difference yourself.

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