Triathlon great Jan Frodeno ticked off the first significant step on his journey to trail running’s biggest event in some style over the weekend.
The 44-year-old won every race that mattered in swim, bike and run, including Olympic gold in 2008, three IRONMAN World Championships and two 70.3 World Championships.
He retired at the end of 2023 after the IRONMAN World Championship in Nice and he was back in the French city on Saturday for a high-profile 55km trail race along with thousands of other runners – Nice Côte d’Azur by UTMB.
On the trail to OCC
Earlier this year Frodeno had revealed a big future target for him is to compete in the gruelling OCC UTMB event across the Swiss Alps.
Regarded as an iconic challenge for mid-distance and ultrarunners, the 56km race forms part of the UTMB World Series Finals, trail running’s blue riband event. It starts from the Swiss village of Orsieres, heads through Champex-Lac and onto Chamonix, hence ‘OCC’.
The qualifying process for that can be somewhat complicated but Frodeno’s performance in Nice over a virtually identical distance – and over 2,000 metres of climbing – bodes well.
For he finished a hugely impressive 15th male out of 1,378 – with all of those above him significantly younger. Indeed Frodeno won his 40-44 age category despite being at the higher end of it.
His time was five hours and 27 minutes, less than an hour behind the winner who was Spain’s Miguel Benítez, a 23-year-old pro trail athlete for Asics Running who clocked 2:14 for the Seville Marathon earlier this year.
‘I’ll be back’
And afterwards Frodeno posted on Instagram: “Well, it was a long time on my feet… thanks @utmbworldseries Nice for taking such good care of me but I‘ll need a couple of days to use Arnold’s famous: I‘ll be back with true conviction😂
“Well done to all competitors! A little homesick so I’m already in the car to see my fam.”
And there were some impressive messages of congratulations, including Formula 1 driver Valtteri Bottas who lives in the area and said: “Nicely done and good to see you live smashing the trails!”
Former multiple IRONMAN winner Heather Jackson is now one of the world’s top trail runners and she was another to give some well-deserved kudos.
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