Triathlon
Master of 2 realms: Kristian Blummenfelt is triathlon's unstoppable force
Kristian Blummenfelt has made history by smashing a sub-seven-hour Iron Distance triathlon. Here's how a decade of training in the lab and on the racecourse prepared him for this moment.
Update: On Sunday June 5 2022, Kristian Blummenfelt became the first-ever athlete to complete a sub-seven-hour Iron Distance triathlon, finishing the race in 6h 44m and 26s. Speaking before the race in the following interview, Blummenfelt detailed his journey to this momentous feat.
Kristian Blummenfelt's path to becoming the world's most formidable triathlete is really a study in two parallel, and sharply contrasting, realms.
On the one hand, his rise is the culmination of a 10-year project at the cutting edge of sports science, where every millilitre of oxygen intake is measured, every tiny change of racing position assessed for aerodynamic drag and every calorie consumed and burned is accounted for precisely.
The results speak for themselves, with the big Norwegian completing a hat-trick of major wins in the past year, from the Tokyo Games to the triathlon world series and recently the IRONMAN World Championship at St. George, Utah.
But to truly get a sense of what makes Blummenfelt tick, you also have to factor in the sheer joy he experiences doing triathlon and how fortunate he feels to be making a living doing what he loves.
It all adds up to a decade-long journey in the sport that's as much a passion play as a scientific obsession.
Because outside the lab and far from the wind tunnel, when the barrel-chested Blummenfelt is muscling his way around the course, he manages to tap into human instincts that are as basic as they come.
That can make a big difference in a format that requires competitors to scrap it out shoulder-to-shoulder for hours on end, where they must put in levels of effort that leave them somewhere beyond exhaustion and where even stopping for a call of nature can be a luxury too far.
His next challenge, in Dresden, Germany, on June 5 is to see if he can complete the full IRONMAN distance – swimming 3.8km, cycling 180km and running a marathon equivalent 42.2km – in under seven hours.
That would mean slicing more than 21 minutes off the world's best time he himself set in Cozumel, Mexico, last year. Even though the conditions will be favourable, with a flat course and other assistance including specialist pacemakers, it may just prove to be an impossible feat for a human being.
If so, it won't be for lack of preparation – or sheer determination to squeeze every last drop of performance out of his body however tough the competition gets.
Take the latter quality first.
Blummenfelt's strong heart and lung capacity add up to a "big engine"
© Daniel Tengs/Red Bull Content Pool
Now aged 28, Blummenfelt has never believed he was the most naturally talented athlete and up until his golden year in 2021 he had only ever won two races.
But he was blessed with natural physical advantages in a strong heart and big lung capacity, giving him what he describes simply as a "big engine".
That's obvious enough as soon as you see him on race day or in training with that powerful upper body, all pumping arms and huge bursts of breath, and contrast it with the much smaller build of many of his competitors.
It's almost like you are running for survival, you know? You imagine like having an animal behind you
What you can't see is what's going on in his head and the tricks he plays on himself as he kicks for home during the final run, and imagines that his survival is being threatened in order to generate an extra adrenaline jolt.
"Of course, we're all tired, but you want to have that feeling like you are running scared," he explains. "It's almost like you're running for survival, you know? You imagine like having an animal behind you, then you can really get that adrenaline kick. I try to use the same kind of instinct when I'm in a race."
Blummenfelt trains every day, usually three sessions a day, for 1,300 hours in total last year alone. During training camps he can burn through 8,000 calories a day easily – meaning just eating enough is a significant challenge in itself.
He can get into the right mood by listening to the same song over and over again. It doesn't even matter which song it is – just whatever he finds in the Spotify Top 50 with a tempo that feels right.
"It’s just for the rhythm mostly," he says. "Even if I put one song and I repeat and listen to it for like 30 minutes when I’m training, because I often do that just for the rhythm. If I’m running hard and I have a tough session, I just put on one song and put it on repeat, because I feel like I get through that 20 or 30 minutes and then I get bored of this song and I switch, put another song on repeat."
It's out on the racecourse, during competition however that Blummenfelt is truly at his best, due in part to his willingness to fight – and suffer – more than anyone else.
Blummenfelt trains every day, usually 3 sessions a day
© Emil Sollie/Red Bull Content Pool
Take the Olympic race in Tokyo. During the final run, he was surprised to see so many athletes had managed to keep up the pace and remain in contention.
With 3km to go, he made it to the front and his first kick put some separation between his leading group of three and the rest. While his rivals for the gold stayed with him for a while, Blummenfelt's response was brutal and he sounds surprised, not to say almost disappointed, that no one could make more of a fight of it.
"With like 1,500 meters to go, I did my second acceleration," he recalls. "I remember looking over my shoulders and thinking: 'Already?' I wasn't expecting them to let me go that quickly, I was expecting to be kind of putting in a surge, and another surge, but I felt I got the gap almost at the first time of really trying.
"And it's just about taking the scissors and cutting off the elastic band, and making sure that the gap is holding up as quickly as possible to avoid getting a comeback from them, from behind."
The power of inspiration and innovation
Blummenfelt's ability to produce such devastating performances is due to the work he and his team put in behind the scenes.
His initial inspiration as an athlete came from Norwegian swimming hero Alexander Dale Oen, with whom he trained as a youngster. Oen died after suffering a heart attack in 2012, just before the London Olympics. Blummenfelt still feels his loss and trains in a pool in Bergen named the AdO Arena in Oen's memory.
"It was obviously cool to have him around and he made it easier to believe that I could be good as well," he says. "I could see how he went from being a junior guy to becoming one of the best in the world, or the best in the world."
In terms of coaching, Blummenfelt gives huge credit to the influence of Arild Tveiten, the visionary behind Norway's triathlon programme, who took him on – somewhat reluctantly at first – in 2010 and a year later and turned him from a swimmer who could run into a specialist triathlete.
Blummenfelt credits his team's uncompromising approach for his success
© Daniel Tengs/Red Bull Content Pool
His preparation ramped up a notch when Olav Aleksander Bu joined the team shortly before Rio 2016. As Blummenfelt explains, Bu is the sort of person who gets up at 5am each day just to see if anything new has been published in the field of sports science, or if anyone is doing something weird and wonderful with data.
"He came on board in 2016, just to follow and see what we were doing, and then he started giving feedback on what he saw in the numbers, how we could improve and how we could take it one step further.
"I think having a guy like that is really good, because you feel there's so much we can work on. Even though we've had the greatest year in triathlon during the last 12 months, I still feel there's so much I can improve because of what we see and find in the lab. I think that's helping me kind of taking it one step further every time."
The attention to detail involved in taking those steps is mind-blowing. Everything about his training programme has been tailored to Blummenfelt's needs – literally in the case of the changes to the position of the seams on his clothing, based on drag readings in the wind tunnel.
Then there's the use of highly specialist "doubly labelled" water, in which the hydrogen and oxygen elements are replaced with isotopes to facilitate tracing. Subsequent analysis, after the water has been expelled by the body, means the team can measure to the exact calorie how much energy Blummenfelt has burned.
Efficiency is the key and he and the team do a lot of work in the Eindhoven University of Technology lab, analysing data from sensors that can read exactly how much energy he's taking in.
If his optimal readings for power per oxygen molecule are off, for example, it means he's producing too much heat – something else they can measure very precisely via his heart rate monitor – and look to make small adjustments that make a very sizeable difference.
Blummenfelt's first hero was Norwegian swimmer Alexander Dale Oen
© Daniel Tengs/Red Bull Content Pool
I think we're taking it a few steps further than anyone else
"Normally, when I'm breathing in oxygen, 81 percent can go into heat management and then 19 percent can go into power on your pedals," he explains. "If I can squeeze that 19 to 21, then it’s like a 10 percent improvement in power."
The team also bring lab tests into the field, measuring not only how much energy Blummenfelt's using, but whether it’s coming from fats or just carbohydrates, to choose just one more example of many areas.
"I think we're taking it a few steps further than anyone else," he says. "You have a lot of groups who maybe do one, two or three things like this, but probably no team does it to this extreme."
His triathlon triumphs at Olympic and world level were matched by the Bermudian athlete Flora Duffy in the women's triathlon, something he's pleased to point out, but no one has managed to hold both major triathlon titles and the IRONMAN world championship at the same time – and Blummenfelt is nowhere near finished.
Before turning his attention to the next IRONMAN worlds in Hawaii in October – and later to the extremely difficult proposition of switching back to the shorter triathlon distance for Paris in 2024 – he has the high-profile Sub7 and Sub8 event in the German city of Dresden.
His big rival in the men's race was to be Britain's Alistair Brownlee, who pulled out ahead of the event and was replaced by another Brit, Joe Skipper. But whoever Blummentfelt is racing with, he's clear that his priorities lie in winning rather than getting under the seven-hour time.
Blummenfelt has a willingness to fight – and suffer – more than anyone else
© Daniel Tengs/Red Bull Content Pool
"For me it's a unique opportunity to prove that I'm the best ironman athlete out there," he says simply. "I love to set myself quite tricky targets, because then I know that I have to do the work to get there. It's a big part of the motivation to just get there," said Blummenfelt before Brownlee pulled out.
"However, I don't want to get 6h 58m and finish second, so it’s even more important to beat Alistair. If I beat Alistair and I do sub-seven, it’s going to be halfway through on another fantastic year."
Just halfway?
"I kind of want to win it all this year, too,” Blummenfelt explains. "Even though I won the first IRONMAN Championship last year, I want to win the 2022 edition as well in October. So, after the race I want to re-focus and think about Hawaii almost straight away."
Blummenfelt's sub-7-hour attempt is the culmination of a decade's work
© Daniel Tengs/Red Bull Content Pool
If there's one story that truly sums up Kristian Blummenfelt, it's the way he reacted much earlier in his career to being out injured and unable to run for nine months, after he'd broken the navicular bone in his foot.
"Yeah, nine months without running," he says, with an air of someone remembering past trauma. "I remember I was so missing running that I was going through Google Maps, going through all the running loops that I used to do."
If that image feels like someone pining for a lost love, it's because the sport is more than a job to Blummenfelt, more than a calling even, and he certainly doesn't look at the endless hours he puts in as a hardship.
"I like not thinking about it as sacrifices," he says. "It's more like I’m able to do my hobby for a living and that's what I wanted to do when I was a kid, so, yeah, I’m not having to sacrifice much really."
The technological innovation, the exhaustive analysis, the huge levels of effort, they all make a difference. But if you’re looking for one thing that sets Kristian Blummenfelt apart, it's really simple. He just loves triathlon – and that’s one thing you can’t develop in a lab.
Maybe that big heart of his is the secret after all.