He ended up second, one spot better than last year in Nice. Rather than be frustrated that he couldn’t get the win, he was relieved that he was able to do as well as he did.
“I was very certain my day was done entering T2,” Denmark’s Magnus Ditlev said in an interview just hours after his tough day at the office at the Ironman World Championship in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii.
“I struggled big time,” he said of his race. “I will take a lot of valuable learnings with me, how I managed to fight all the way to the end and stayed positive and optimistic. I kept believing, even though in T2 I was just looking out at the water and questioning what I was doing here. The fact that I managed to keep moving and end up in second place, to be honest, I can’t really believe it when you consider the state I was in on the last part of the bike and transition. I’m really happy and relieved.”
Ditlev had powered to the front of the chase pack early in the bike, then made a huge effort to try and get up to the front with France’s Sam Laidlow, who also rode away from the field at last year’s world championship race in Nice, which he won.
“I felt like if I wanted to win the race I had to do it,” Ditlev said of the chase. “I tried to minimize the gap and I got it down to 1:35 in Kawaihae, but in the last hour I paid the price for that.”
Ditlev lost ground through the final hour of riding along the Queen K, which left him shattered in T2.
“Start with an easy pace that you can sustain,” he told himself, as he started the race.
Then, once he got out on the run, he found himself moving up through the field, and eventually got into the runner-up spot, which he maintained to the line.
Ditlev came into the race with some lofty ambitions.
Can we say Magnus Ditlev holds the full-distance world best?
“I was thinking winning a T100, Roth and Kona would have been a dream season, and that was pretty motivating for me,” he said. He started the year off with a win at T100 Miami, then won his third Challenge Roth title in a row. Roth is very different to Kona, though.
“I think the Roth course suits me perfectly,” he said. “If I had to make a course, it would basically be the Roth course. This is pretty different. I’m a big guy and big guys produce a lot of power, but that has to go somewhere and that becomes heat in the end. I have to be really careful about how I pace, especially on the run, and I have to pay a lot of attention to cooling and nutrition. I think we are getting close to cracking the Kona code, even though today I had some issues that I hoping not to have in two years time.”
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