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The following profile is an excerpt from my “TriRating Report 2016”. You can find more details in this post or get your own free copy here.

There can’t be any doubt about this year’s male Rookie of the Year: Patrick Lange’s win at IM Texas and his third place in Kona with a new run course record were big surprises, and his “can’t believe it myself” finish in Kona was one of the emotional highlights of this season.

Patrick’s background is in mountain bike racing. Injuries after a “stupid crash while warming up” forced him to take a break from MTB racing and he started cross training and triathlon. He’s had some success in short distance racing and was part of the German national youth squad. But he was always a couple of seconds too slow in the swim, and missing the front group kept him from being competitive on the international level.

He moved up to middle distance racing in 2012 (7th at 70.3 Wiesbaden) and got his first Pro podium at 70.3 Luxembourg in 2013. He enjoyed the freedom of setting his own schedule and planning his training. He was racing the “big races” with deep, strong field such as St. George or the 70.3 Champs, and while he was picking up paychecks he didn’t have any breakthrough podium results.

After the end of his 2015 season he started to work with Faris Al-Sultan. “Faris and I had met a couple of times in training camps in Lanzarote, rode together a few times and much enjoyed chatting with each other. We were joking that he’d be coaching me once his career was over, not expecting that he’d be ending his Pro career after Texas 2015.” Faris adds that “I was hopeless trying to coach my now-wife Ina, but as I was always self-coached and put a lot of thought into training– still making a ton of mistakes.” It seems that Faris is not making too many mistakes with Patrick: When Patrick moved to long-distance racing for the 2016 season, he immediately found great success.

Patrick didn’t really know what to expect going into the Regional Championships in Texas. A big field of more than 50 male Pros offered strong competition. Faris was hoping for a 2:48 marathon which could result in finishing between third and sixth. Patrick was able to swim and ride with a larger group, being in 5th place in T2 but there were about 15 athletes within a minute of him. It was quickly apparent that he was the best runner of that big group: “My legs felt really good and even holding back I ran 20 seconds per k faster than planned.” When Andy Starykowicz was forced to DNF after having built a big lead on the bike, Patrick stormed to the win with a 2:40 marathon, earning an automatic Kona qualifier slot.

IM Texas 2016 suffered from finding a decent bike course after construction made the old course unusable, issues with getting permits for a new bike course and then some more changes after flooding. In the end the bike course that was used measured roughly 94 miles (instead of 112 or 150k instead of 180k) and it made assessing his performance tricky. For other athletes I didn’t use the Texas results as a basis for predicting Kona, but as Patrick’s only long distance race was Texas, I had to do some number juggling. In my “Kona Rating Report”, I seeded Patrick in seventh place – pretty similar to Faris’ expectations (“2:48 marathon resulting in a finish between 5th and 15th”). His home stay in Texas (where he prepared for Kona) gave him another boost: “I was thrilled with TriRating’s 7th place seeding, but my host father said he thinks that I’ll do even better than that.”

In Kona Patrick swam well (less than a minute off the top swimmers) and had closed the gap to the front when he received a penalty. “I was overtaking a number of athletes and probably took too long to overtake when the group was speeding up again.” According to the rules it was drafting, but to me it sounds more like he was not yet experienced enough to properly deal with the larger groups and the hectic pace at the start of the Kona bike. Andi Raelert was in the penalty tent with him and encouraged him to stay relaxed even after dropping back into 42nd place. Patrick decided to “do my own race” and did not try to chase the front group. Even though he lost another five minutes on the bike to the leaders, he slowly started to move up in the field – at the start of the run he was ten minutes back in 22nd place. He was about as fast as Frodo and Sebi for the first 10 miles of the run and by the time he climbed Palani Road he had moved into the Top 10. By the time he hit the Energy Lab, he had run up to his friend and training partner Boris Stein, moving into 6th place. Each athlete he passed gave him more and more energy. At the end of the Energy Lab he was able to see third to fifth place in front of him on the Queen K, and he picked off Tim O’Donnell, Andi Böcherer and Ben Hoffman to move into third. By then he was flying and when he crossed the finish line he was clearly on an adrenaline high. His run split was 2:39:45, beating Mark Allen’s 1989 run course record. “While running I was just checking the splits on my GPS. Faris and I were hoping for about a 4-minute pace [per k, about 6:24 per mile, equal to a 2:48 marathon] and I was just happy to build a cushion to that pace. I had no idea of my overall time.” In his Slowtwitch interview he says “When Mike Reilly announced that I broke the course record, I looked at Mark and said I’m sorry. I really look up to that man.” Mark appreciates the gesture: “Patrick was great. He apologized for breaking my record! Super nice guy.”

There was a bit of a controversy in the days after the race whether Patrick’s run was the fastest marathon in Kona after all. For example, here’s what Dave Scott said in his interview on ‘Breakfast with Bob – Championship Edition‘: “When Mark Allen and I raced in 1989, our time in T2 – off our bikes, changing into shorts – was folded into our run time. My friend Pat Feeney had Mark run the marathon in 2:38:53. Patrick Lange had a phenomenal run and in the record books it’s going to go down as the fastest run ever – Mark Allen holds it though.” Similar data was mentioned in a 2013 article by Triathlete magazine (“Chasing the 2:40 Hawaii Ironman Marathon“).

To me, it’s pretty much impossible to compare Mark’s time from 1989 and Patrick’s time from 2016 – 27 years apart. First of all, not only the time spent in T2 is a difference between these two runs, they were also done on different courses (even if similar). The last major change to the run course was in 2003 when the pier in Kona became T1 and T2. Before that there were separate transition zones, and the run course included a section called ‘the pit’, a hot and steep section that probably made the old run course harder than what it is today. That’s also the way I understand Dave Scott’s comments: Not as a dig against Patrick’s performance, but as an acknowledgment of how awesome Mark’s 1989 run was and of the breakthrough that duel meant for the sport of Triathlon. Mark simply says “Patrick broke my record. I’ll let others debate the finer points of that.”

Almost everyone I spoke to agrees that it’s quite unlikely that we’ll see an explosion of sub-2:40s in Kona. Mark says “Patrick’s time could reinvigorate the guys and get their minds working on having that be the new standard they need to be able to hit to win in Hawaii. It’s very possible to break 2:40 in Kona, not even a question, even sub-2:35 is doable. But I don’t think that you’ll see everyone suddenly running at that level. The main reason is that Ironman Hawaii is a closed energy equation. You just can’t go super-fast in one place unless you go slower somewhere else. And the guys who win have pretty much fine-tuned that equation and so far no one has gone under 2:40 and won the race, which ultimately is the goal of most of the top people racing … to win.”

After Patrick flew back home after the race, he received a lot of media attention in Germany. When he landed in Frankfurt there were a couple of friends and members of his local Tri and swim teams to welcome him – in addition to at least three local TV and radio crews. Then he just quickly went to his apartment for a change of clothes and flew on to Berlin where he appeared in ‘Morgenmagazin’, Germany’s main ‘breakfast TV show’. Over the next days there were some more TV appearances and a lot of interview demands.

What can we expect from Patrick in the next years? Faris is trying to set the expectations not too high: “Patrick is still ramping up his training, the main goal will be to stabilize his performance.” In the long term, Patrick could be an athlete to put some pressure on Frodo – Patrick is a potential front-bike-group athlete with the ability to maybe run faster than Frodo. Therefore, Frodo might feel he needs to be more active on the bike and put a buffer between him and Patrick in T2. That’s maybe a bit too much to expect from Patrick in the next season or two, but at 30 years of age he still has a lot of Ironman racing ahead of him!

(Photo: Patrick running in the Energy Lab. Credit: Jay Prasuhn)

The following profile is an excerpt from my “TriRating Report 2016”. You can find more details in this post or get your own free copy here.

Kaisa has been eying long-distance triathlon for a long time: “The first time I heard about this sport was when I was only 12 and my father told me about it. I instantly thought that it would be something very cool and so on one beautiful day I went out and did the longest discipline of IM, the 180 km ride, on my little pink mountain bike. After that I knew that Ironman would be my passion! However, I ended up swimming and didn’t start triathlon until high school. Then it was the Olympics I was heading for. My whole ITU career was packed with injuries and after one of those in the summer 2015 I really started to think what I want to do with the rest of my career. I felt in my heart that I have to follow that childhood dream and to go for Hawaii. So here I am!”

Her first Ironman race was IM Barcelona in October 2015, and she was in the lead from the start: “I never thought I would be the first out of water. Then on the bike I was leading all the way without knowing how hard I should push as my plan has been to follow the other women, not to go faster than them! But I started a little too fast and was pretty tired at the end of the bike, so Yvonne caught me at T2. During the marathon I was scared the whole the time: It was my first time running that distance so I did not know how it would be after 30k. Towards the end I was sure I would faint but somehow I survived until the finish line.” She makes it sound as if she exploded and barely walked the last 10k – but in fact even an experienced Ironman athlete such as Yvonne Van Vlerken was able to put less than three minutes into her. Kaisa finished in 8:48, the fourth fastest time of the 2015 season!

Going into her next IM, the African Regional Championships in South Africa, she was looking for a solid 5th place that would put her firmly on the road to Kona. She had another great day, and when some other athletes had problems (including Jodie Swallow who crashed on the bike when the helicopter was getting close to her), Kaisa ran a 3:02 marathon, the fastest of the day, and won the race and an automatic qualifier slot. “It was quite a surprise, winning was amazing! My feelings were a bit mixed as I was very happy to win the race and get my ticket to Kona, but at the same time I was sorry for Jodie as it is never nice to win when someone has been forced to pull out because of bad luck. But my goal in Ironman racing is to find my own limits and to do my very best on race day, so I don’t want to focus too much on what everybody else is doing.”

After qualifying, Kaisa was very much looking forward to Kona, but didn’t feel too much pressure to place well: “My goal was to enjoy the experience of fulfilling that childhood dream! My goal was just to do a solid race without blowing up and to collect as much experience as possible for the next years. My coach Paul Sjöholm and I thought that Top 10 might be possible.” Her ‘Sport for Good’ teammate Timo Bracht mentioned her as a solid Top 5 contender: “I did not believe it when Timo told about that Top 5 prediction!” But in the end Timo was right, and Kaisa had a great Kona debut. After a slow swim she didn’t panic but worked for the first two hours on the bike to ride up to Mirinda Carfrae’s group: “For some reason I swam a little too easy and getting out of the water I was full of energy and excitement. After I caught Rinny I was riding with her for a while, then took up a faster pace again. I did have a goal wattage but I started way too fast and blew up a lot more than planned.

“After a slow T2 I caught Rinny at about 1k. At this point I could not believe that I was running with her. The audience was incredible and I got so excited that I overtook Rinny and at some point I heard that I had a lead on her of more than 15 seconds. Timo ran in the other direction and was yelling to me not to be crazy and to slow down. Then I got scared. I knew I was in real trouble, what a rookie mistake! Rinny caught me and I was trying to go with her for as long as I could so I would get some draft advantage in the head wind, but soon after the 10k mark I had to let Rinny go. I had to dig really deep and recalculate what might be the fastest pace for my body to do the marathon without having to crawl at the end.”

Jay Prasuhn captured Kaisa getting water from Peter Reid in the Energy Lab – it’s pretty clear she didn’t recognize him:

“I was so dead that the only thing I could think about was to go straight and to survive to the next aid station! But quite cool to see that Peter Reid gave me water – thanks a lot to him!” Again, she makes it sound as if she completely blew up, but she finished in fifth place, lost only five minutes to Mirinda Carfrae and towards the end almost caught fourth place finisher Anja Beranek.

Kaisa received a lot of attention in her home country: “Triathlon is now a quite fast growing sport in Finland and it has been very nice to see that my performance has inspired new people to try this sport. However, the most heart-warming welcome after Kona I received from some of my best training mates – the lovely grandpas and grandmas with whom I share the lanes in the local pool every morning. They bought some beautiful flowers for me and were all incredibly happy and proud of me!”

After Kona, Kaisa made some changes to further improve over the long distance. “I now have a new coach, Siri Lindley. We were working with my former coach Paul Sjöholm for 18 years but after Kona I really felt that I needed someone more experienced with IM racing to be able to take the next step. Of course it was not easy for either of us to let go from our long term relationship, but this change gave us both great new opportunities. His biggest strength and passion is in Olympic distance and coaching younger athletes – maybe not so much in coaching this ‘old diesel machine’. Despite of our paths going in different directions, Paul will always stay as one of the most important persons behind my sports career.

“I saw Siri in Kona at one swim session where she was coaching Mirinda, and I said to my boyfriend that it would be so awesome to have that kind of a positive and passionate coach one day! So when I contacted a few coaches around the world this autumn, Siri just felt best for me. It’s a great honor to join Team Sirius.”

Siri is also happy to work with Kaisa: “Kaisa is such a great athlete, and a phenomenal human being. I am so excited to have the opportunity to really work with her. Training her specifically for the great challenges of Kona, our goal is to build up her strength, fitness and speed so that she can be consistently performing at the highest levels, while staying healthy, motivated, happy and fulfilled!

“The training she is doing now will be quite different to what she is used to. It is exactly what she needs to get to the next level of performance. We are an amazing fit as athlete and coach, and are one million percent committed to achieving all new levels of performance, and fulfillment in the sport. We are both so excited to embark upon this great journey together!”

Kaisa describes how they plan to work together: “I was in Boulder for ten days in late November so Siri and I got to know each other. Now for the winter I will be training in Spain so the coaching will happen through TrainingPeaks and Skype. In the spring I will go to Boulder for about six weeks and then also for at least three months before Kona. I really look forward to these blocks in Boulder as that will be the first time for me that I’ll be training with other world class Ironman athletes!”

The coaching change is a clear sign to me that Kaisa has bigger goals in mind than just another fifth place finish in Kona. It’ll be interesting to see what improvements she will be able to make under the guidance of Siri in the next years.

(Photo: Three-time Kona winner Peter Reid handing water to Kaisa in the Energy Lab aid station. Credit: Jay Prasuhn)