Visually impaired British man achieves incredible feat at Norseman – ‘the race that makes triathletes cry’

The Norseman Xtreme Triathlon in Norway is renowned as one of the sport’s most brutal events.

It was one for triathlon legend Sebastian Kienle’s ‘bucket list’ farewell tour last year and is labelled “the race that makes triathletes cry” – a 3.8km swim, 180km bike ride and 42.2km run, but that barely tells half the story.

It starts with an iconic 5am plunge from a ferry into icy waters, and finishes with a marathon through unforgiving boulder fields up Mount Gausta at 1,850m above sea level.

Among many remarkable stories this year – and our full race report is here – one really does stand out and that’s the achievement of visually-impaired athlete Iain Dawson, who has less than 5% vision due to a rare genetic eye condition.

With the help of his guide Baard Grindberg, he not only completed the race in 16 hours and three minutes but he also finished in the top 160 which means a fabled black t-shirt. Astonishing.

‘Truly incredible’

Duncan Shea-Simonds, who guided Dawson to a World Ironman record of 10 hours and 31 minutes back in 2019, first alerted us to this latest staggering accomplishment.

And since then we’ve been chatting to Iain himself to find out more.

He’s been involved in the sport since 2009 and has multiple world and European titles across a range of distances.

Amazingly it was way back in 2010 when he and guide Grindberg, a Norwegian, first discussed taking part in the Norseman but for one reason and another the first opportunity didn’t come until 14 years later.

Dawson told us: “We’d kept in touch, remained friends and always talked about it almost as a joke as we’d try to get in each year but it never happened. And then suddenly last year the opportunity came up and I rang Baard and his first response was ‘oh God’! He was around 10 kilos over his race weight at that point but he did such a good job of getting prepared and he’s given up quite a lot of time and his family time as well.”

Jumping into the dark

So the race became a reality, but what particular challenges did it pose for Dawson and Grindberg – from the start on the ferry through to those boulder fields?

Beginning with the swim, he told us: “It isn’t a normal Ironman, which is a big enough challenge in itself, but obviously, you’ve got a few other factors to consider, like the jump off the ferry to relative darkness. 

I don’t have very good eyesight, almost none really, in the dark.

“So I was considering things like, I want to do the jump, but I wasn’t sure what that’s going to be like because you can’t really train for jumping off a ferry very easily!

“And would I be able to actually see Baard or the tether in front of me? So I was experimenting with putting little lights on and things like that, which actually I didn’t need in the end as there was enough daylight.

“And then it was about the cold water. I don’t tend to do too well in the cold, I struggle a little bit to keep warm. But we were relatively lucky. It was allegedly 15 degrees so not too bad, but obviously we were in there a while.”

‘We could have done with one or two more gears’

So the swim was ticked off and it was onto the bike: “The thing with the tandem was they don’t go uphill particularly efficiently. So it’s trying to make it as light as you can while carrying everything you need.

“And then it was all about the gearing. We thought we’d got it right but it was still a bit of a guess because we didn’t have the kind of length of hills at the Norseman to just go and train on. And also, you don’t have the fatigue from being five or six hours in so that was a bit tricky. And I think, to be honest, we still could have done with one or two more gears.

“But Baard was a very steady pair of hands. On the tandem, apart from the physical effort of trying to get up the hills and cover the distance, he’s got to be very competent on those descents. We were hitting 54, 55 miles an hour on some of the descents. And he wasn’t taking too many prisoners because that’s the only time we were going to make any ground. 

“I guess for me, the run itself was probably largely less of a concern because Duncan [Shea-Simonds] had told me, you can only really run the first 15 miles, which was quite a relief. You’ve got the long walk up zombie hill, though we did try to run some of the bends just to try and make up a little bit more time on people. 

“But then the real challenge for me, if we got to the black t-shirt cut-off time, was going to be that last 5k. We had done a little bit of prep on our June training camp, just doing some runs and scrambles up climbs to see how I would cope with it because it’s not really something I would normally do. It’s quite difficult visually and concentration-wise, especially when 14 hours-plus in.

“I think we just knew that that last 5k if we made it, it was going to be really slow and so we didn’t really care about things like finishing positions. It was more about participating and completing rather than competing.”

Inspiring others

They did all of that and more to claim a coveted black t-shirt and when asked where it ranks among his achievements, he told us: “It’s really hard to sort of rank it as such, but I guess it’s right up there because it’s something I probably wouldn’t have ever considered doing. 

When I started to think about triathlon, it wasn’t even on my radar but it’s pretty cool to have done it with Baard after all this time.

“And my support crew – Jill, my long-suffering wife, and Baard’s brother Ove were brilliant and made it all possible.”

Away from triathlon, Iain is a lead physiotherapist for the NHS, working with people who have a learning disability, with a large part of that role promoting the benefits of physical activity and a healthy lifestyle.

He and his team are working on developing a pathway around that and this latest feat of his own will surely inspire many others to also push their limits.

So what’s next? “It was kind of all about the Norsemen this year but I guess I’ll just let the dust settle a little and take it from there.”