At first it didn’t seem like it was real. While Jan Frodeno and Lionel Sanders did a great job of selling the Zwift Tri Battle Royale as a social media challenge, in fact the event was a well-organized and well-planned race to enable the two long-distance stars to go after a screaming-fast full-distance time.
Set in Allgau, Germany, the race featured a 3.8 km, four-lap swim in Grossen Alpsee Lake, a five-loop, 180 km bike course that feature banked turnarounds, and a four-loop marathon. The course was flat and fast and the goal was to beat Frodeno’s full-distance world-best time of 7:35:39 set at Challenge Roth in 2016.
You can check out our photo gallery from the event here.
Despite rainy conditions and a brutal fall part way through the marathon, Frodeno did manage to break his record from Roth – completing the swim in 50:48, then biking an impressive 3:55:22 and following all that up with a 2:44:21 marathon run to finish in 7:27:53. It’s likely Frodeno would have gone even faster without the fall. On the first lap of the run he averaged 3:42/ km, after he fell at the end of that first lap he would go on to average 3:48/ km for the second lap, 3:55/ km for the third and 4:09/ km for the fourth.
We caught up with Frodeno after his amazing performance – watch the video here.
While Sanders was never close enough to his German rival to pose much of a threat, he did set a new personal best with his 7:43:28 finishing time.
