I’ve been stewing on this for as almost a year now…the 1.4-mile swim at Chattanooga 70.3…It’s complete bullshit.

First of all, the bike is already a mile long, now you’re gonna tack on 3-4 minutes for my swim? Fuck outta here with that noise.

I get it. Moving it across the river and up to the tennis courts means it’s a straight shot down river…but that’s so incredibly sorry as it panders to weak swimmers.

The old swim had about 400 meter upriver swim before turning back down river. If you can’t swim upriver 400 meters with a light current then bless your heart but you need to get your ass more time in the pool because that’s not hard, you chooch. You can float down the Tennessee River and still beat the cut if you’re too tired from a meager upstream swim.

True story: two weeks before the first IRONMAN Chattanooga in 2014 a dead body was pulled from the Tennessee River. They said even that dead body could make the swim cut because of the current. 

It all could be a moot point though — Chattanooga health department is really big on CoVID and could not give IRONMAN the permits as this race would be considered a large gathering. Keep in mind that though they moved to the other side of the river it doesn’t change that it’s a point-to-point swim. They’re going to need to bus a lot of people from Point A to Point B, will the city let them do that? A socially distanced rolling start line could stretch a mile or longer (6’x2,000 people = 12,000’/5,280’ = 2.27 miles).