Jonny Brownlee is currently mapping out his race calendar for 2025 and his focus in the first half of the year will be on middle-distance.
Brownlee has the full set of Olympic medals – bronze and silver behind brother Alistair in London and Rio respectively and then a Mixed Team Relay gold in Tokyo.
But he missed out on selection for last summer’s Olympics in Paris and it was only towards the end of the year, when he was injury-free, that he began to rediscover his top form, rounding it off with sixth place in the supertri Grand Final in Neom.
Doing ‘something different’
He’s dipped his toes into middle-distance racing before, taking part in Challenge Daytona in 2020, IRONMAN 70.3 Portugal in 2021 and Challenge Mogan-Gran Canaria in 2022.
And it’s a return to the Canaries which is where he plans to start off his 2025 campaign, though it might be preceded by an appearance in the sport’s shortest format at the supertri E World Championship.
Speaking on a Brownlee Fitness Q&A session which is embedded below, Brownlee was asked about his hopes and aspirations for the year.
He said: “Without sounding too kind of cliched, I think my aim for the next couple years is to enjoy it. I feel like I’ve lost the enjoyment a little bit over the last few years of maybe taking it a bit too seriously.
“My body has had niggles and things like that so I just want a couple years of really enjoying it.
“More than anything I want to be competitive in all those races. But [also] turn up and enjoy it. Go back to why I really started the sport.
“I’ve already started that by doing different things. I did a cross-country race, the Yorkshire Champs, about two weeks ago, and I realised how hard 11k on the cross country is, it was absolutely brutal.
“But again, it’s just that I want to do something different, and then I’ll start my season with a couple of 70.3s before going into supertri. I might actually start with a supertri indoors in early April.”
IRONMAN Leeds on the radar
Asked which races he had his eye on, he added: “I started looking the other day and I really enjoyed racing in Gran Canaria when I did it a couple years ago. Although I actually forgot to drink in that race because I just got carried away. I didn’t drink anything and absolutely blew up. So I’ll probably start in Gran Canaria at the end of April.
“That’s a Challenge race and then a few IRONMAN official races that I actually need to look at over the early summer months. And then it’s into some supertri racing.”
Brownlee has a stake in the Brownlee Racing franchise in supertri and will be involved as both an athlete and team manager again in that sphere.
But one new event which has caught his imagination is IRONMAN Leeds which will take place for the first time on 27 July.
However he’ll probably resist the temptation to get involved this time, explaining: “I think there’s likely to be supertri races around then and as much as I’d love to enjoy it and try everything, I think an IRONMAN into a supertri, maybe that’s a bit too much of a step.
“But you never know. At some point I want to do an Ironman. I’m not sure if I want to do it competitively or just do want to do it – and Leeds would be the perfect one for that.
“So we’ll wait and see. Although it’s probably quite a brutal one to start with!”
Racing to keep up: Is social media making us train harder?
