Frequently Asked Questions

You qualify by finishing high enough in your age group at a Kona-qualifying Ironman-branded race. Each age group's winner gets an Automatic Qualifying Slot; everyone else competes for Performance Pool slots, awarded by age-graded time across the whole gender field rather than by age group alone.

The Kona Standard is a set of per-age-group, per-gender factors - the average finish time of the top 20% of World Championship finishers in that group over the last 5 editions, expressed as a ratio to the fastest group (M30-34/W30-34). Multiplying a finish time by this factor produces an age-graded time comparable across every age group.

The Performance Pool is the set of qualifying slots left after each age group's Automatic Qualifying Slot is accounted for. It's split by gender based on start-line field size, then awarded to the fastest age-graded times within that gender - regardless of age group - until every slot is filled.

Roll-down is what happens when someone offered a slot doesn't take it: the offer passes to the next-ranked athlete in line, and so on, live at the race's roll-down ceremony. An Automatic Qualifying Slot rolls to 2nd, then 3rd place in that same age group if declined; Performance Pool slots roll down the age-graded ranking.

An Automatic Qualifying Slot goes to a specific age group's outright winner (or 2nd/3rd if they decline). A Performance Pool slot isn't tied to any one age group - it's awarded purely by age-graded time across the whole gender field, so the fastest non-winners overall get first claim on it.

CSS approximates your swimming lactate threshold - roughly the pace you could hold for a maximal 1500m or one-mile swim. It's calculated from the difference between a 200m and a 400m time trial, cancelling out start/turn overhead to isolate your true sustainable pace, and is the foundation for setting swim training zones.

FTP is the highest power you can sustain in a steady effort for about an hour - the most widely used benchmark in cycling for setting training zones and pacing races. Since a genuine one-hour all-out test is brutal to pace, it's normally estimated from a 20-minute test at 95% of average power.

Critical Power is a modelled power output, similar in concept to FTP, sustainable for roughly 30-40 minutes, derived from the relationship between power and time to exhaustion rather than a single test. W′ is the finite anaerobic energy reserve above CP, in kilojoules - the “battery” for surges and hard efforts.

Threshold pace is the fastest pace you can sustain aerobically for roughly 45-60 minutes before lactate starts accumulating faster than your body can clear it. It's the anchor point for setting running training zones, from easy aerobic runs up through tempo, threshold, and VO2 max efforts.

CdA is your bike-and-body coefficient of drag multiplied by frontal area - the single number that determines how much power air resistance costs you at any given speed. Lower is more aerodynamic. It can be estimated from a real ride using the “virtual elevation” method against your recorded elevation data.

Sweat rate is how much fluid you lose per hour of exercise, and it varies a lot between people and sessions - so a generic hydration guideline is really just a guess. Weighing yourself (holding your bottles, so fluid drunk during the session is already accounted for) before and after tells you what you actually lost.

A brick session pairs two disciplines back to back - most commonly a bike ride straight into a run. It's not really about running fast off the bike; it's about teaching your body to switch between completely different muscle recruitment patterns, which is the closest training gets to how race day actually feels.

Dan Furze is an amateur triathlete documenting his pursuit of Ironman World Championship qualification, coached by Andy Brodziak of Tri-tanium. The Kona Dream Project is that public journey - training logs, race strategy, and free tools for other triathletes chasing the same goal.