With his mind packed full of the valuable lessons learned following his troubles in Texas, Jelle Geens believes he has what it takes to give Kona qualification one more shot this season.
A chastening full-distance IRONMAN debut saw the Belgian crash out midway through the marathon, his world championship dreams temporarily placed on hold as he has been forced to re-evaluate a strategy which was clearly left wanting in The Woodlands.
Not one to give excuses, an athlete who has enjoyed huge success in middle-distance competition, accepts that he simply wasn’t ready, neither physically nor mentally, to deal with the challenges that lay in wait for him.
It was always going to be a huge ask
Having never once run a marathon or even cycled 180km, it was always going to be a huge ask to do them on the same day, in the same race, one after the other. And as it turned out, it was a task too great for even an athlete of Geens’ obvious class and ability.
Well placed after the swim, and again in the hunt after a strong showing on the bike, things started to go wrong around the 17km mark in the run, and by the time he reached 30km, the pain in his quads and hip flexors was too much for him to carry on.
He is not, however, ready to give up just yet.
As the aches and pains of his aborted effort started to wear off last week, the reigning 70.3 World Champion was already plotting another crack at securing qualification for the full distance equivalent on the Big Island later this year.
‘I feel like I want to give it another go’
Believing that he understands where he went wrong is a huge first step on that road to improvement. Now, he must sit down with coach Ben Reszel and come up with a training plan which can enable his body and mind to maintain the race-winning form he clearly displayed in both the swim and on the bike.
Talking to Aaron Royle on their All in Triathlon podcast, Geens explained that he was not feeling ‘too distraught’ about his Texas DNF and that while he was obviously disappointed not to have achieved his goals, he is confident he has what it takes to bounce back stronger.
And he is ready to take heed of the lessons that were so brutally dished out a few weeks ago.
“I feel like I want to give it another shot in qualifying for Kona,” he said. “I think I have it in me. Even with just some small tweaks, I think I can really be up there, and Kona is still a long way ahead, and I could do a lot in training for that race.
‘I expected to do a lot better’
“So I do want to give it another shot. I feel like, otherwise, it’s been a failure. Having the goal of going to Kona and just giving it one shot and then saying, ‘I’m just going to not go for Kona this year and focus on 2027’… that’s giving up on it. Which I don’t feel like I’m ready to do.
“I’m obviously very disappointed with this race. I expected to do a lot better. I guess this failure, and how hard it was, maybe makes me mentally more ready for the next race as well, for the next IRONMAN. So, at the moment, I feel like I want to give it another shot.”
Among the lessons he will take away from Texas are things like fuelling better for the run, not heading out at such a fast pace in the first half of the marathon, and also becoming more used to the TT bike, which he admits left him with a headache and sore neck, having been in the stooped position for more than four hours.
And there were also key takeaways from his fellow competitors that gave him a real insight into how to race in a seven-hour-plus IRONMAN event.
‘This race definitely opened my eyes’
“I feel like this race definitely opened my eyes a bit,” he said. “There needs to be more focus on me and not really worrying about winning the race, at least at the start of the run, and don’t go out at a pace that almost no one has ever run before. I think that’s definitely a lesson. There is a lot that can happen in the second part of a marathon.
“There were some people in that Texas run that really showed how to do it. I think Casper Stornes and Vincent Luis set off at their own pace and then caught a lot of people towards the end and came third and fourth. They really did it smart, and I think I definitely have to learn from that.”
With 23 professional male slots still available for Kona, Geens is right to want to give qualification another shot, and with all that he has learned in Texas at his disposal, few would bet against him securing his place wherever he decides to race next.
You can listen to All in Triathlon with Jelle Geens and Aaron Royle on major platforms, including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Buzzsprout, and Podcast Addict.
