Lionel Sanders reveals Ironman bike blowup, nutrition nightmare and the quest for triathlon ‘insanity’ as he prepares for Kona countdown

Lionel Sanders duly claimed victory in the final running of IRONMAN Canada in Penticton last weekend, but it was a victory which did not come without its challenges.

The race was downgraded to a duathlon with unseasonably chilly temperatures leading to the cancellation of the swim. In the end we got a bike time trial followed by the traditional marathon.

‘No Limits’ had 10 minutes in hand on Aussie Sam Appleton heading into T2 (or T1 as was), and he would eventually take the tape with a victory margin of more than eight minutes.

Afterwards though the 36-year-old from Windsor, Ontario revealed that it had not all been plain sailing, in fact far from it. A bike blowup followed by a nutrition scare had made it a somewhat uncomfortable finish to the day’s proceedings.

‘No Limits’ on IM Canada win

Speaking in his traditional YouTube video debrief, Sanders revealed: “I pushed a lot of power, so I ended up holding for the first three-and-a-half hours, just under 330 Watts, which through three-and-a-half hours is probably a lifetime best for me. I averaged 340 in Mont-Tremblant 70.3 as a a reference point, and I had the fastest bike split by a minute over a 90k bike. And so it was a lot of power, and certainly beyond what I was prepared to do on the bike.

“So I blew up with about 45 minutes or so to go on the bike. I averaged 250 for those remaining 45 minutes. But the reality here is you don’t know what you don’t know, until you know. To be competitive at the very top you have to be insane at biking. And so it was good for me to see where I am at, and how close to insanity I am at this moment. Because if I want to be competitive, I will have to be insane.”

Nutrition debrief

That blowup on the bike left Lionel with another problem to contend with – the prospect of another nutrition nightmare.

He explained: “My other task for this race, because my stomach shut down in Lake Placid – it was showing signs of shutting down already by mile 8 of the run, I stopped at the Porta Potty at mile 12 and I was puking at mile 14. So it was totally shut down by mile 14.

“So my major goal here was to back off the carbs a bit and hopefully make it deeper into the race. The goal of course, the A Plus, was to make it the entire race without puking, or having the sensation to puke. Meaning my stomach was still emptying.

“And I actually backed off from, Placid I was about 115g of carbs per hour. I backed off, I was trying to be dynamic this time – in other words if I felt good I would eat more, and if I didn’t I would back off. I ended up hitting 105g on the bike but admittedly I was quite nauseous – not nauseous but like I could feel I was not in a good place coming off the bike. I had to really ease off.

“So once again, I’m back to the same thing I said after Placid – it doesn’t matter if you consume 110 or 105 if you’re not absorbing it, it’s irrelevant. So maybe you could work your way up there but you’re not there right now. So once again I think it was too much, because then I probably was already on the back foot on the run.

“On the run on the other hand I only consumed about 70g per hour – but I made it through the whole run, didn’t puke, didn’t really blow up. Of course if you overbike you’re gonna have repercussions of that of course, which I did. But at kilometre 36 I ran a 3k averaging 3:43 per kilometre, so I still had something in it, I still had another gear.

“I wasn’t nauseous during the run – of course I puked my guts out at the finish line – so that to me means we still have areas to improve on and to work out. Because to me that means my stomach was probably shutting down around 2:10 would be my estimate in the run. So we need to devise a method to get all the way to the end, still absorbing.”

Can Sanders win Kona?

Now, of course, all roads to Hawaii in October for Sanders, so what are his prospects on the ‘Big Island’?

“Can I win? I may very well have missed the boat in 2017,” he admitted.

“I’m an athlete through and through – I think you have to acknowledge reality. So maybe I missed the boat 2017, that was my best shot. And maybe my second best shot was 2022 in St George, and maybe I missed the boat and the door is closed for me. No problem.

“Does that take away that I can still have my fullest potential race? No, that is still fully available to me and I have not achieved that yet. This new school/crop of guys inspire me. They’re like me when I started – they’re fearless. They don’t listen, they don’t care what other people have to say. They execute what they feel they need to execute to be the best and what they’re capable of. That’s a very intuitive way that I used to train, and I was able to achieve for me fairly mind-boggling performances from doing so.

“And so they inspire me to go back to my roots from that standpoint and push myself to insane levels, and then recover and do it in a race. So I’m excited to do that, and I’m excited to just keeping working towards, I don’t want to say conquering the Ironman distance, but solving the Ironman puzzle.

“And I have not been anywhere near solving it yet.”