Cheering for an Ironman legend in Nice

“Oldest woman in the race” is not exactly the way Missy LeStrange would have chosen to be billed in the lead-up to the 2024 Ironman World Championship in Nice in September.

“Normally I am not the oldest woman,” said LeStrange, 72, who found herself alone on the podium on Sept. 22 after finishing in a time of 15:13:39. It was the USA Triathlon hall-of-famer’s third straight age-group title in as many years, and her 33^rd Ironman world championship race.

LeStrange is not particularly surprised that fewer older age-group triathletes turned out to the Côte d’Azur than Ironman might have hoped. She has raced in Nice before, in the 70.3 world championship in 2019 (finishing second in the 65 to 69-year-old category, just 12 seconds behind Canadian Rosemary Wedlake), and although the bike leg took a different route, she remembered those challenging mountain climbs and descents.

“The bicycle course was extremely daunting to many women, and it was even to me,” LeStrange said. So when she returned to France to see the men compete last year, she rented a car and drove the entire course to get her head around it.

“I really thought, ‘Oh my goodness, this is scary.’ But I didn’t want to back down from a challenge. So I went home and I started training for it — specifically, for the bicycle ride.”

Home for LeStrange is Visilia, in California’s San Joaquin Valley, in the shadow of the Sierra Nevada. “I have the mountains in my backyard, practically. I could just go out and train. I knew I just had to put more mountain time in.” She bought a new bike: a Specialized Tarmac, with disc brakes. She took it up into Sequoia National Park and around Yosemite, and she rode and rode, alone most of the time.

“I did a lot of ups and downs, a lot of twists and turns. I practised,” she said. “You know, 8,000 feet (2,400 metres) of climbing, I don’t think Kona has even half of that.” Not to mention, the cliffs and the overhangs.

By the time she arrived in Nice, LeStrange knew she was ready for the course and nailed it, exhilarated by the spectacular vistas and the cool air — a reprieve from the heat she is used to, after so many trips to Kona.

“On race day, I was just smart about things. I just went steady. I didn’t push it going up the hills; I didn’t push it going down the hills. I knew I had a marathon to run at the end.” She was surprised by how much she loved the four-loop, flat run course. The predictability of each loop — knowing exactly how far it was to the next aid station — turned out to be a bonus, and she felt carried along by the enthusiasm of the crowds, who stuck around even for those further to the back of the pack.

“People were standing there for hours and hours, cheering and jumping up and down,” she says. “If you gave them a wave or a smile, they cheered louder…. That was fun.”

Few in that crowd knew they were cheering for an Ironman legend. Triathlon was not even a thing yet when LeStrange signed up for masters swimming in 1977 after moving to Davis, CA to pursue an agricultural degree. Her swim coach was none other than Dave Scott, who won the first of six Ironman titles in Kona in 1980. In 1983, LeStrange joined him on the Big Island to race her first-ever Ironman.

“I did it because I didn’t think I’d ever have time in my life to do it again,” she said. She was about to embark on her career as a farm advisor, which meant long hours in the field. It turned out, however, that she found herself with a little down time every fall, after harvest season. That gave her a few weeks to ramp up her training, just in time for Kona — year after year after year.

At 40, LeStrange joined a youth swim club in Vesuvia, and she still swims with the kids, four evenings a week. She no longer paces them in the fast lane, she admits. “I’m doing different workouts now, but I’m right in there with them.” For years, she’d do long Saturday runs and speedwork sessions with a running group, and she learned to ride with a cycling club made up of some serious male athletes. Unlike a lot of triathletes, LeStrange can handle herself in a peloton.

Her perennial presence on the triathlon scene led to an invitation in the early 1990s to sit on the board of the precursor to USA Triathlon, the governing body for multisport in the United States, and she helped draft the age-group rule book, dividing people by age into five-year categories, pronouncing on when wetsuits could be worn and banning booties — rules that she is happy with to this day, “even though my toes are getting a lot colder, a lot faster than they used to.”

Her work for the betterment of the sport — not to mention her place at the top of the world championship podium in her age group for 10 straight years, from 1991 through 2000 — contributed to her induction in 2012 into the USAT Hall of Fame.

These days, LeStrange gets invited to talk about the history of the sport at events like the celebration of 50 years of triathlon at the sport’s birthplace in Mission Bay in October. She shared a place onstage with Cherie Gruenfeld, a 14-time age-group world champion and the oldest woman to ever complete the Ironman World Championship at 78, in 2022. Gruenfeld, a fellow Californian and LeStrange’s good friend, no longer does Ironman races, but the pair will both be in Taupo, New Zealand, to vie for their respective age-group titles at the 70.3 World Championship on Dec. 14.

LeStrange says she has no ambition to wrest the title of “oldest female world champion” from her friend, but as long as she stays fit and healthy, she has no reason to stop racing.

“It’s my lifestyle,” said LeStrange, with a shrug. “I like swimming and biking and running. I am aging, but I am not ready to change my lifestyle.”