The Norwegian superstar of triathlon Kristian Blummenfelt29, wants to know in advance exactly to the minute when the video interview with Urheilu will be done and how long it will take.
It’s no wonder when, in Lahti on August 27th, the Bergen native, who is aiming for the world championship in the half distances, i.e. 70.3 competition class, opens his harsh everyday life from his mountain camp in Font Romeu, France. There is not much time left.
In Finland, triathlon is a relatively popular recreational sport, but on the map of the mainstream media, the sport has no longer had the same place as, for example, the world’s elite Pauli Kiurun in the golden days 30 years ago.
Therefore, it is appropriate to open up a little about what kind of event Blummenfelt will travel to Finland as the guest of honor after first competing in the USA and Singapore.
6000 competitors
From over a hundred races of the Americanized Ironman series, 6,000 mass athletes and fitness enthusiasts of different ages have qualified for the Lahti World Cup event to join top professionals.
The accommodation capacity of the whole of Lahti and its surrounding area has been sold out for a long time, and the event leaves the area with at least millions of euros. A large number of people in the area avoid the competitors from their homes to another accommodation for the duration of the event and at best offset the rental income of thousands of euros.
World Triathlon Corporation, the owner of the series, charges EUR 700,000 for the right to organize, which is the same amount as the organizing subsidy granted by the city of Lahti. Ironman series competitions have been organized in Lahti for half a decade already, but they are making their debut at the World Cup level now.
– I have never been to Finland. I know a little about the route, says Blummenfelt, who toiled through the half distance (1930 m swimming, 90 km cycling, 21.1 km running) in the fastest time of 3.29.04.
For the full distance, he has the ME result of the Ironman series on 7.21.12 from Cozumel, Mexico, from the other year. Blummenfelt admits that he is a little saddened by the fact that the top time is only set at the peak of the downstream swimming section.
– It is true that the downstream helped in the swim for about seven minutes, but instead everyone seems to have forgotten that the cycling route was two kilometers longer than announced, so the net benefit was only 3-4 minutes, the good-natured athlete laughs.
Two Olympic champions
In Lahti, on August 27, at least two Olympic champions, i.e. the Finnish legend of combined skiing, will take to the route Hannu Manninen and Blummenfelt, who won in Tokyo 2021.
A few months after the Olympic Games, Blummenfelt won the Hawaiian full-distance classic, or Kona. In the 70.3 series, he is the reigning world champion.
This fact confuses the Norwegian, because in triathlon the quarter and full distances of the Olympic category require very different qualities and very different training from the athlete.
The race finishes are also radically different; It’s bad for Kona if the body is tuned to perform as well as under the Olympic medal – and vice versa. That’s why Blummenfelt, for example, in Hawaii keeps the training volume and even the intensity very high right up to the threshold of the event.
– This kind of versatility can be successful if you start with short distances and start competing on longer ones alongside them. It won’t work the other way around, because the Olympic distance requires a completely different ability to disengage and explosiveness than the full distance, says Blummenfelt, who started competitive sports with swimming and running.
– I wasn’t particularly talented in either, so triathlon was recommended to me, says the student of the Bergen-based multi-sport club Fana IL.
For next year, Blummenfelt has nailed down a blunt goal:
– Olympic gold, 70.3 series World Championship gold and full-distance (Hawaii Kona) World Championship gold. No one else has been able to do that.
The amount of training for such an athlete is naturally interesting.
– 1300 hours per year (competitions included). About 45 percent of that time is cycling, the rest swimming and running. I don’t work out at the weight room, and I hardly use massage. I pay a lot of attention to the quantity and quality of the food. My muscular condition has always been very good even without touching the irons, says the Norwegian, who has become an endurance athlete of this level.
No rest periods
Such a huge amount of training corresponds to about 26 hours a week calculated all year round, and Blummenfelt is active all year round. In elite marathons, the transition or rest periods familiar from, for example, skiing or running have generally been left out of the calendars of the elites, and the elite are in competitive condition almost all year round. There are a huge number of competitions on every continent and all the time.
– I am clearly reducing my training for only a couple of weeks, during which I take care of, for example, my sponsor obligations.
It would be easy to simply accumulate training hours, but Blummenfelt has another line.
– Every week I do six (three by bike, two by running, one by swimming) hard or fairly hard speed endurance training. The rest is restorative, i.e. low-power training. Sometimes I might change the run to a bike run if I feel too stressed.
In developing his competitive capacity, Blummenfelt relies above all on so-called threshold training. There, the heart rate range is kept such that the body is still able to remove as much lactate as it produces it. After years of successful threshold training, the triathlete is clearly able to increase his race pace without muscle stiffness and fatigue.
High oxygen uptake capacity
The world’s best triathlete has also been called the world’s fittest man, although the concept is of course very multidimensional.
– It sounds good, but it’s a matter of definition. When it comes to long-term performance, I’m certainly the fittest people in the world, but on the soccer field I would get tired quickly.
On the test mat, Blummenfelt’s maximum oxygen uptake VO2max value has been measured as high as 92, which would be the absolute top level in all endurance sports.
Although Norway’s Olympic training center Olympiatoppen is a high-level producer of support services for the country’s top athletes, Blummenfelt has no business there. He has completely withdrawn from national team activities.
With these amounts of training, your body is of course already very familiar, but the sponsor family includes many manufacturers of tools that produce different sports data.
– I monitor typical values such as heart rates, lactate concentrations, cycling power and cadence (watts and pedal revolutions per minute). In general, I am very interested in data and use it a lot in coaching.
With such a training load, the control of the total load and power is a precise task, because under-recovery is constantly lurking behind a couple of faulty movements.
Blummenfelt does not miss Olympiatoppen’s support measures; he has direct access to modern innovations even without.
– Let’s say that I prefer to listen to people who write scientific articles than to people who read them.
In Finland, Blummenfelt would be a big name in the headlines every week, but in Norway, where there is an abundance of sports stars, just one big name among others.
– I admire my colleagues the most Erling Braut Haaland, Jakob Ingebrigtsen and Karsten Warholm.
Shocking epoch cart
On the anti-doping front, the triathlon circus, which was mainly fought clean, was shaken up in the spring of this year by an American star by Collin Chartier doping cart It was brought about by the use of epohormone, which accelerates red blood cell production. A familiar, but forbidden booster for several endurance sports.
Chartieria was coached by Blummenfelt’s Norwegian training partner, a top champion in another sport by Gustav Iden brother Mikal Iden.
– Both the Ironman series and other players in the industry do tests for me. I am also involved in the Adams system.
It means that Blummenfelt has to use the application to indicate an hour and a place where he can definitely be tested for each day of a certain period.
– Collin’s cart was a big surprise and made me think about how common it (use of prohibited substances) is.
In order to develop the main tour of triathlon, the Norwegian, who is already comfortably prosperous in his career, has kept a thinking cap on his head.
– You should have the courage to break familiar models. It would be possible to compete even on separate trips like today and above all to ensure that the best of the best would be brought to the same place at the same time more often than now.