Refresh me; is it male/female alternate years at Kona & Nice now?
I can only imagine just how diluted an all-female field in Kona would be. Could they even fill the race?
‘we cordially invite you to spend your life savings (if you have them) on a race the other side of the World, that you had no plans to do’
Yes, 2024 is Nice women, Kona men.
Not sure if the contract is beyond that, ie the Nice race will rotate while Kona stays put. It might depend on the new CEO and fallout from this year.
If I was a betting man I’d go they will carry on with split pro and AG fields but will split the AG’s differently maybe up to 40 vs 40+ to try and fill the AG fields at both venues.
Even if you aren’t taking a Kona slot, don’t you get a plastic M for the mantle piece?
reading IMJWales you’d be led to believe it was Kona temperatures, not Wales in September? there are people missing cut offs due to “heat exhaustion”, someone missed a cut off even though " i made all my cuts but got told I couldnt continue after the bike, but always do ironman distance in training" and then Riptide V2.0 who "did the first lap in 50mins but got stuck and although was swimming, was going nowhere an took 1hr 30 for 2nd lap :-o
so was it really that bad? Must admit, the swim looked like glass, and the skies certainly were not Wales in September 
but it didnt look “hot”
It was absolutely fine.
You won’t get a calmer sea swim than that.
Yeah it was a bit warm but only where people have been used to 15° for a few weeks.
Aside from my foot I wasn’t struggling with the conditions. Like Jorgan said. It was warm not ‘hot’.
There was definitely some tidal aspects going on as the tide receded. It was slow across the back, long section (going in the opposite direction) and then people were getting pushed really wide on the return leg to the beach. I’d clocked that the current was pushing me wide so I reset my course and sighted more to compensate.
I was shocked at how many people were way over by the cliffs!
I think top 3 do but could be wrong.
Mrs FB had one from IMFrance in 2008 (won her a/g) but dropped it and it broke……she was mortified 
I suspect an all women Nice race would be even harder to fill than an all women Kona 
Is there a startlist anywhere for the female Kona this year? Would be interesting to see numbers. After year one, I’d imagine the pool of those intersted in travelling would be even smaller year-on-year? It’s not a growing sport anymore.
It was perfect temp low/mid 20’s, certainly not hot and miles off Kona / Frankfurt. There was a briefing about heat exhaustion at TCR and the fact that it is really easy to confuse heat exhaustion with normal exhaustion…. I would suggest that these people were suffering with fatigue
Yes the swim did have a slight current but not enough to impact a semi competent swimmer. As @Adam said there was some pretty terrible sighting and lots of people were just following like sheep, the swim course marking was excellent, i could see 2 marker buoys ahead almost the whole time.
My sighting was pretty good, there’s a bit of normal Garmin noise, you can see on lap 2 (next to number 6) that current was pushing me a bit wide
I’m going to give them a pass on this one 
I’ve done Lanza & Roth this year , followed the same salt and watts limiting strategy and I suffered yesterday in the middle of my run whereas didn’t on the previous runs.
IMJ will be full of first timers that have had a shit summer and a host of YouTube videos showing them how cold it’s gonna be.
That was a A quick thanks for all the support especially @Doonhamer. Someone in a kilt jumping up and down shouting your name certainly got my attention which was a great pick me up. Appologies for keeping you up late. Had a quick chat with @Toyota_Crown who was looking great especially wearing a brand new IM run cap (I’ll let him explain how i know). Sorry i didn’t catch up (in the social sense) with anyone else. I’ll do a report from the non-pointy end of the race
I haven’t downloaded mine yet but it’s gonna be nothing as neat as your twos. First lap was all over the place, 2nd not so bad
Anyway, special mention to the feed station on the way down from New Hedges where there were a couple of memorable attributes displayed by the staff 
if it was anything like the Hooters aid station at Outlaw 2010 then it would have been memorable
Really? I found that whole Hooters thing overhyped and very forgettable. They had on regular black pants and just a regular black and orange t-shirt. They looked bored AF and didn’t seem to know why their boss had sent them there at all.
They did have some fresh orange quarters though. 
