Deichmann his name. Jonas Deichmann. Extreme athletes. His goal is 120 Ironman distances. The start is on May 9th, and then an Ironman every day for four months, 120 x 3.8 kilometers of swimming, 180 kilometers of cycling, 42.195 kilometers of running.
Question 1: Why? To know what’s going on, says Deichmann. After all, at 36 years old, he is now at the peak of his performance. And there is always a little more. He has already completed 120 Ironman distances in his well-marketed “triathlon around the world”. 456 kilometers swimming, 21,600 kilometers cycling, 5063 kilometers running. It took him 429 days to do this. Of course that’s too long, it has to go a little faster, which is why the Ironman route is now 120 times in the Franconian triathlon metropolis of Roth.
Question 2: Is this still sport? Well, yes, one might answer, sport does, but a special kind: not a popular sport that is based on health standards, nor a quality sport that is measured in competitions with a manageable time, but rather a quantity sport according to the motto: Do you do 1000 push-ups in an hour , I do 2000. If you do 2000, I do 3000.
And so on, ever further, ever towards the Guinness Book of Records. Why suddenly do push-ups now? Because my personal Guinness favorite athlete is the Brit Paddy Doyle, who – under supervision – did 1,500,230 push-ups within a year, just over a million and a half, 4100 per day.
This text comes from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.
Back to Deichmann’s Ironman project: Briton Sean Conway holds the record with 105 long distances in 105 days. So Deichmann raises by 15. Like in poker. None of this is new, it’s more like an old cowboy hat. The model American James Lawrence, for example, whose nickname is “Iron Cowboy,” completed 50 long-distance triathlons on 50 consecutive days in 50 different American states almost ten years ago.
Problems with that? He sometimes fell asleep on the bike when his pulse rate was 100. So my tip: If you, dear readers, are planning a similar project, keep your eyes open on the bike, otherwise it won’t work with the Guinness Book.
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However, if you don’t currently plan to raise the stakes in Ironman endurance poker, someone else will. Says Lothar Leder, who was the first to finish an Ironman in less than eight hours in Roth in the 1990s. Deichmann’s problem, says Leder, is that tomorrow or the day after tomorrow someone will get up who does 365 a year. An Ironman every day from Christmas to Christmas. And so on and so on. You see, the longer you put off the project, the more difficult it becomes.
