Tom Gurney: Triathlete to Ironman

It takes an incredible amount of dedication to sport to become a triathlete. Just the fact that you have to be at race levels of fitness for three almost completely different sports is enough to make my head spin. This is why we wanted to document exactly what sort of conditions Triathletes have to conquer to keep their fitness at its peak. During the winter the races stop and the hardcore training starts. Dark freezing mornings, high winds, lashing rain, snow and sub zero conditions all make a warm bed a much more enticing place to be for the average human, but these hardcore men and women have the motivation to get out in these far from perfect conditions for the love of their sport.

Tom Gurney is a step above the rest of them, this 25 year old has been training for the past 3 years to get himself out to fly across the globe and compete in the Iron Man competition held in Taupo, New Zealand. Consisting of a 2.4-mile (3.86 km) swim, a 112-mile (180.25 km) bicycle ride and a marathon 26.2-mile (42.2 km) run, raced in that order and without a break. Most Ironman events have a strict time limit of 17 hours to complete the race.
As a Triathlon goes, that’s just about the biggest challenge one can do. So we wanted to document Tom’s training regime before the event and how he dealt with English conditions compared to NZ.

We used a our brilliant portable 4 x SB800′s hyper synced with TT5 pocket wizards to light Tom and make him stand out in the bleak winter countryside.