Performances of the decade: John Wragg completes Ironman number 200
The Mississauga, Ont., native completed his 200th Ironman event in Cozumel in 2015 and hasn't stopped racing since.
While this “performance” is really an acknowledgement of a series of performances spanning over four decades, one of John Wragg’s most significant milestones came in the 2010s.
After finishing his 100th Ironman in Malaysia in 2008, Wragg completed his 200th in November of 2015 in Cozumel.
The now 69-year-old began competing in Ironman races in 1988, first doing the New Zealand race in March. After that event, he challenged a friend to do the other four races on the Ironman calendar that year: Japan, Germany, Canada and the Ironman World Championship in Hawaii.
By the time he got to Hawaii, he was “blown out. In horrible shape,” he said in an interview a number of years ago. But, he was hooked on Ironman racing.
The Mississauga, Ont., native has completed all of the Ironman races around the world, and as of 2016, so has his wife, Elizabeth Model. From the time Wragg finished his 100th full-distance race in 2008, he averaged 14 per year to get to 200 in 2015.
Since hitting that mark four years ago, Wragg has continued to race frequently, most recently finishing Ironman Lake Placid, Mont-Tremblant and Lake Placid over a six-week span in the summer.
As of last month, when Model completed her 99th Ironman, Wragg had finished 256 full-distance events.
