He’s won multiple Ironmans, but gold at the Ironman World Championship isn’t on his resume yet: Britain’s Joe Skipper is a serious underdog for the upcoming Ironman World Championship in St. George. The Professional Triathletes Organization followed the athlete in preparation for what will hopefully be the race of his life. Skipper might be considered an underdog, he has his sights set on the highest prize: the win. “They should hope that they’ve upped their game, because I’ve definitely upped mine. Everyone’s beatable.”
“If people think he’s unbeatable, they should be ashamed”, Skipper says about Jan Frodeno. “Because there is no way someone’s unbeatable. You’ve all got to swim, you’ve all got to bike, and you’ve all got to run.” Skipper will head out to the Ironman World Championship in St. George for one thing: “I’m going there for the win. I’m not messing around.”
Honest hard work
“Sometimes you just got to look at it like a job. If I was working 9 to 5. You couldn’t just wake up one morning, feel tired and ring your boss up and say ‘I’m not coming in today, because I’m tired’. […] You show up, don’t you? When we’re training, there are different people who come, and they’ll come to like one, two or three sessions, and then you won’t see them for two months or six weeks. I’ve trained with like 40 different people on a semiregular basis, in Norwich, but none of them stick to it regularly. They’ll just miss it and be inconsistent, but that’s what it really takes… Consistency. That’s the hard bit. You just gotta think of the bigger picture: like do you want to win the races, get good results or do you want to be average, or even get terrible results? It’s just showing up. Day in, day out.”
