Thornton takes sporting challenge to the Xtreme

Talking Sport with Stephen Glennon

Jumping off the back of a car ferry into the icy waters of a Norwegian fjord and swimming 4km to shore; cycling 180km across snow capped mountains; and concluding the 13-hour triathlon with a 42km run which finishes almost 2,000m above sea level seems insane. However, for Salthill triathlete Kevin Brian Thornton, who turned professional this year, doing an event such as the 2012 Norseman Xtreme Triathlon – distances equivalent to an Ironman – in Norway was all in a day’s work.

“If you Google it, you will find a good few YouTube clips, especially from 2010, and it gives you a real sense of the event,” laughs Thornton, who is a qualified physiotherapist based in Dublin.

“Basically, you are up at four in the morning and you go down to this car ferry and you get on in your wetsuit. You are then taken 4km out and the back ramp, where the cars get off, drops down and you jump into the pitch dark. You then swim over to the kayakers where all the swimmers are lined up.”

He admits there is a crazy element to it and for many, particularly those triathletes hailing from warmer climes, it was a huge shock to the system. Not though for Thornton, who, of approximately 500 triathletes, was second out of the water. “So I had a really good start,” he continues.

“After the swim, you had to climb five mountains [on the bike] and then drop down to sea level and it was straight into the marathon. The first 25km was on the flat, but then you end up back at the top of the mountain, 2,000m up. So, you are climbing over loose rock and snow and all that kind of stuff.”

If simply getting through all that was not bad enough, triathletes had to reach certain points within an allocated time along the route to be allowed to continue to the mountain top. “If you don’t hit that cut-off point by a certain time, you have to do the lower route.

“You are not allowed to climb all the way to the top because daylight comes into play and there are issues of safety. So, they don’t allow everyone to finish up there but I managed to get up there myself and I got the black t-shirt. You got a white t-shirt if you did the lower route.”

Thornton completed the event in 13 hours. Just to put the ‘extreme’ element of the race into perspective, he did the Austrian Ironman in 10 hours and two minutes. “It’s not the distance; it is just the conditions and the environment,” he says.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.