Reigning IRONMAN 70.3 World Champion Lucy Charles-Barclay has had surgery to remove a troublesome tendon but is confident she will make a full recovery and make “a very big jump forward” when she returns to action.

The British star is ranked number three in the world after last season which saw her notch five wins, with the highlight that memorable 70.3 Worlds success in Marbella.

Remarkably that came just four weeks after the heat and humidity got the better of her at the IRONMAN World Championship in Kona after herself and Taylor Knibb had bossed the race before they were both forced to withdraw late on.

Not an easy decision

But 2026 starts with her in a boot on her right leg as she begins rehab from surgery and in her latest YouTube video, which is embedded below, she explains how she got to this point.

She said: “Towards the back end of last year, pretty much after the 70.3 Worlds in Marbella, I started to get some real irritation in my lower leg. I thought it was my Achilles tendon. Anytime I did any real speed work on running, it just seemed to get really irritated for the following few days and then would go away.

“And then the second I would do speed work again, it would flare up.”

LCB revealed a hyaluronic acid injection helped initially but then less so, meaning that surgery came into the equation: “I was really cautious at first – I never want to jump into surgery. I wanted to make sure I could do everything to manage it myself without doing that.

“And I quite quickly realised that this time this just wasn’t going to work. We had quite an in depth conversation about surgery and decided that it was definitely the right option for me. It felt like we were jumping into it quite quickly, but I honestly believe that I’d done everything I possibly could and in order to save my year, I wanted to get this done as soon as possible.

“Ultimately the main reason for doing it is to add longevity to my career and allow me to keep performing at the level that we’re used to seeing me perform at. So it was kind of okay. There were definitely tears involved in the decision. It wasn’t an easy decision to make, but once I’d made the decision I was at peace with it.

“So the surgery that I had done, was I had my plantaris tendon removed – 12 centimetres of the tendon was removed and it was in that part of the tendon that there was a huge thickening and that was what had been rubbing on my Achilles tendon and causing a lot of discomfort.”

‘The right choice’

The good news is that the surgery all went to plan and Charles-Barclay pointed out: “Obviously I’m sat here now in a boot and I’m not back to full training but the experts have told me that you do not need that tendon to function as a high level athlete.

“I’m very positive about what my return to training and racing will look like. And after seeing the tendon when it was removed, I definitely feel like we made the right decision.

“And consulting with my medical team at Fortius, it doesn’t look like any amount of physio strength and conditioning and other kind of more conservative methods would have corrected what was going on. So I do feel really positive that we made the right choice.”

Big targets come later in 2026

So now it’s about building her way back to fitness and top form – something she’s done before on more than one occasion in the past, including a hip fracture back in 2022.

She returned to win the IRONMAN World Championship for the first time in 2023 in Hawaii as well as a string of other top-tier races.

She added: “The good news is obviously we had such a long season last year, very race-intensive and the season finished quite late. So I always had intended to have an extended off season and then start my racing a little bit later.

“The big goals are obviously in the later half of the season and I don’t foresee this really having any negative impact on those. If anything it’s going to be positive because once I do make the return to running, I don’t foresee really having any setbacks. And whilst I’m used to setbacks and this feels like quite a big one, I honestly feel like it’s going to allow me to make a very big jump forward when I come back from this.

“So the big goals are the 70.3 Worlds and Kona. I do have some goals that are slightly more time pressing and we’ll just have to see kind of how that goes. I’m obviously very ambitious, but I’m also realistic as well and want to do the recovery properly.”