SCOTS 70.3 SELLING FAST
New Ironman 70.3 Edinburgh filling up swiftly
Following its launch in December, Ironman 70.3 Edinburgh has become one of the fastest-selling new events on the Ironman calendar. Entries opened for the Scottish event on 19 December and the UK Ironman team expect the 2,000 spots to sell out long before race day.
Ironman’s Scottish debut will take place on Sunday 2 July 2017 in the Scottish capital. The race will commence with a 1.9km swim sea swim from Gosford Sands on the Firth of Forth. After T1, athletes will begin a 90.1km one-loop bike on closed roads through the rolling countryside of East Lothian, Midlothian, and through the outskirts of the city centre of Edinburgh and the Dalkeith country park.
Athletes will then arrive in T2 at the foot of Arthur’s Seat in Holyrood Park before heading off on a multi-lap 21.2km run within the park before crossing the 70.3 finish line. Ironman will confirm the exact course maps very soon, but some of the run course will be familiar to those who raced the ITU World Duathlon Championships at Holyrood Park in 2010.
For age-groupers, Ironman 70.3 Edinburgh offers 35 qualifying slots for September’s 2017 Ironman 70.3 World Championship in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The race has also become a major draw for Scottish professional athletes. Past Ironman UK winners, the Scottish duo of Fraser Cartmell and David McNamee, have confirmed they’ll race, as will Caroline Livesey who came second at Ironman UK in 2015.
“Personally I’m really excited by 70.3 Edinburgh as I grew up in Gullane, and my parents now live just across the road from Gosford House,” says Livesey. “I’ve been running in the grounds since I was small, and have swum in the Firth of Forth countless times. I also went to school in Edinburgh and used to regularly be ‘made’ to do hill reps up Arthur’s Seat during cross-country training.
“The whole race feels like it’s been designed just for me and I can already feel how emotional I’ll be standing on the start line. And what a fabulous finish line that’s going to be.”
With the addition of this new race, the Ironman calendar in the United Kingdom and Ireland now features eight events. These include the fulldistance Ironman UK in Bolton, Tenby’s Ironman Wales, Ironman 70.3 UK in Exmoor, Ironman 70.3 Staffordshire, Ironman 70.3 Dublin and Ironman 70.3 Weymouth, which debuted in 2016. Turn to p117 for the 2017 race calendar.