Triathlon and Ironman

Triathlon is one of the sports events world's most demanding to the point that the longer triathlon is known as Ironman. It is a sport relatively young, but the fact of what has moved it to spectacular heights, reaching to become an Olympic sport since Sydney 2000.

The origin of this discipline that combines swimming, cycling and athletics is confusing, and can be traced both to the seventies as the twenties and thirties, depending on whether you prefer the American version, in which Marines in Hawaii wanted to find that athlete would be the hardest, or a French race was called Les trois sports. However, the American version raises more questions and often refers to her for the birth of the Ironman test, now will be described.

The Olympic triathlon is the softest, compared to the brutalities that are submitted to experts in the discipline. In the test Olympic distances are a 1.5 kilometer swim, 40 km cycling and 10 kilometers of the race. Twice the distance is adopted in the long distance test of the International Triathlon Union, but what really has important fact in this sport is the Ironman test, in which athletes are tested at 3.8 miles swimming, 180 km cycling and 42.195 kilometers race, an entire marathon.

The average Ironman completion is 12 hours, although most of the 17 allas not counted. The record has Luc Van Lierde, Belgium, who won in 1996 a time of 8 hours, four minutes and eight seconds.

We find evidence of Ironman over the world, although it goes without saying that the most prestigious is that of Hawaii, which gave birth to the sport. In Spain we have proof in Lanzarote and South America, Brazil.

For the most extreme, there are still more demanding tests, such as the double ironman, or triple Ironman, though, to me, that borders on cruelty of human sacrifice.