Ian Purcell who is based in Clonmel, Co. Tipperary and his friend Kevin Ryan completed Ireland’s first full indoor Ironman last Sunday 3rd May.
Ian explains how it all came about.
“One of my children got diagnosed with Melanoma last August and the doctors and nurses in Crumlin Children’s Hospital were just incredible. Over the last 8 months, we have seen at first hand the trojan work they do and we want to give something back.
On the 21st April, Myself and my friend, Kevin Ryan, decided that we would try to raise at least €10,000 for the frontline staff in Crumlin by EACH doing a FULL Indoor Ironman Distance Triathlon. We scheduled the event for Sunday 3rd May.
The distances involved were :
Swim 3.86km
Bike 180.25km
Run 42.2km
(We did the EXACT distances)
We used a state of the art Endless Pool (bought second hand from a very famous & notorious Irish sporting personality last December!), our indoor bike trainers (Tacx Neo and Wattbike Atom), and our treadmills.
We will be sticking to Government Guidelines re social distancing in our swimming studio, and the bike and run legs will be done in our separate houses (2min drive away)
Kevin started at 5:30am in the pool and I started at 7:00am.
We cycled the 180km on Zwift the virtual cycling platform, where we were joined by many supporters.
We then ran a marathon on our treadmills.
We had €12000 raised at 5am when we started and by the time kevin finished at 9pm we had €18500 raised.
We both swam 3.86kms, cycled 180.25kms and ran 42.2 kms ALL indoors.
The entire community of Clonmel got behind the fundraiser which was amazing. Hundreds of families here locally did their own cycle or run on Sunday. My own dad (80) ran 65 laps of carpark next door to run 10kms
A Garda Escorted cavalcade of about 50 cars went to both our estates when we were near the end of our treadmill marathon to give us a supporting beeping driveby!! Unreal!! All of this went out on FB and Instagram Live.
https://www.facebook.com/ IPsportsmassage/and https:// www.instagram.com/ianpurcell_ physicaltherapy/ and were posting live updates on twitter @IPtricoaching
Our FB event page is : https://www.facebook.com/ events/571648496805888/
And our donation page is: