This Aussie ultrarunner raced two of the endurance world’s most iconic races back-to-back last year — and she’s about to do it again.
To be a professional ultrarunner is, in a sense, to have a career in doing the seemingly impossible. Australian Lucy Bartholomew is well-versed in that arena. The 28-year-old has raced in ultras (races exceeding a marathon distance, often on trails) since she was 16, when she completed her first 100-kilometer (62.1-mile) race.
Now with 12 years of trail running under her belt, Bartholomew decided to, very casually, race an Ironman. (“It was a COVID idea,” she says.) There’s just a marathon of running in a full-course Ironman — nothing compared to the 100 milers she’s pounded out — but it comes after a 100-mile bike ride and a 2.4-mile swim.
With such a strong endurance running background, it’s perhaps no surprise that Bartholomew excelled in her first triathlon, the Ironman Western Australia in December 2022. She took home fourth in her age group and a qualifying spot in the coveted Ironman World Championships in Kailua-Kona, Hawaiʻi, where Ironman first came to be. That race is many triathletes’ dream. “I always thought I'd be one and done with Ironman,” she says. “But then I qualified for Kona. It’s like the spiritual place for triathlons, so I thought, I can't turn that down.”
The catch? Kona came just six weeks after the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc (better known as the UTMB), a grueling mountain ultramarathon widely regarded as the most competitive and prestigious in the world. It winds 106 miles around Mont Blanc, the highest mountain in Western Europe, amassing a total vertical gain greater than Mount Everest. As a professional ultrarunner for Salomon, Bartholomew says this race was one of her career goals. She qualified in February, a couple of months after clinching a spot for Kona. “I've always wanted to do that, so I thought: Perfect. That's my year, that's my big goal,” she says.
She approached the UTMB with a fervor, Kona becoming almost like a reward. ”I looked at the timeline between the two and I wasn’t super concerned because the race that I wanted to compete at and the one I'm sponsored for was first. So I could really rinse myself out there,” she says. “And then I traveled to Kona with a bit more of a relaxed attitude. I'm an age grouper, I'm making up numbers, the pressure's not on.”
In the end, Bartholomew finished UTMB 10th in her age group with a time of 27 hours, 39 minutes, and 23 seconds. After that, the 10-hour day she put in at Kona looks comparatively easy. There, she took home the 29th spot in her age group and became the second woman to ever complete both formidable races in the same year.
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It’s a pretty cool accomplishment — until you consider that this year, she’ll be doing it again, but with just two and a half weeks between the two.
Equinox+ sat down with Bartholomew the day before she raced the Ironman Asia-Pacific Championships in Cairns, Australia, where she qualified for this year’s women’s Ironman World Championships, to be held in Nice, France. Her vibe, you might be surprised to hear, was astoundingly chill. Here, she shares how she trains for what’s essentially four sports at once (that is, road running, trail running, cycling, and swimming) and plots her conquests, plus her words of wisdom for anyone enchanted by endurance sports.
What It Takes to Be a Pro Ultrarunner with an Ironman Hobby
Adding more disciplines to an ultrarunner’s training schedule might sound like a tall order, but Bartholomew has found that triathlon training benefits her trail running in ways she never expected. “I love training big hours and I think that it can be good and bad. When it was all running, I was probably out-running my love of running before the races… there’s this saying, ‘Change is as good as a holiday,’” she says.
Now, her training is varied, and putting in hours on the bike or in the pool has only stoked her love for her original sport. “I think it's really helped me mentally more than physically,” she says. “I love the simplicity of running and I always will, and triathlon only highlights that more.”
Priority number one is fitting in her trail runs, of which she does up to 120 kilometers a week. Then she peppers in her cycling and swimming around that in a super relaxed way — often basing her rides around nice, sunny days. Her peak week ahead of Cairns was about 26 hours of training; 13 running, then 13 split between the pool and her bike.
It takes a lot to fuel that much activity, but Bartholomew, who’s plant-based, has never not been eating to power through endurance sports. “I've been carb-loading my whole life for this thing,” she jokes. “Nothing changes for me. We just keep doing what we're doing.”
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Finding Success by Chasing Curiosity
Both pro athletes and endurance runners tend to be extraordinarily goal-oriented — but with 12 years of ultrarunning and a lot of hard lessons behind her, Bartholomew wasn’t dipping a toe into Ironman for glory’s sake.
“I'm very much led by curiosity, what hasn't been done before,” she says. “When I ran my first 100-kilometer [race] at 16 years old, I think I had a lot of people doubt me, but they doubted it because they hadn't seen it. And it's very hard to believe in something you haven't seen. It's very hard to achieve something that hasn't been achieved. I really love paving my own path, like doing two events next to each other that probably wouldn't otherwise be perceived as a good idea. And I just chase what sets my heart on fire. Ironman excites me for a different reason than I do a hundred miles.”
That said, going into this year’s UTMB-Nice stack-up, she means serious business. “After Cairns, it's really all eyes on UTMB. I always said that I would race that race twice: Once to see it, which was last year, and once to be curious about what I could do,” she says. “And then to combine that with Nice two weeks later…that really excites me, that double.”
I'm very much led by curiosity, what hasn't been done before…I just chase what sets my heart on fire.
How to Fall for Endurance Sports
The cool thing about running, cycling, and swimming is that you don’t need to go anywhere near ultra or Iron distances if you don’t want to. But if something inside of you is curious, take Bartholomew’s lead by following it onto a race course. “If you've got the opportunity, if you've got the body, if you've got the time and the effort and the want and the curiosity, then chase it because maybe that season will end and you won't have that opportunity again,” she says.
And don’t try to go it alone. “I think the best thing about this sport, for me, is the community,” says Bartholomew. When she started triathlon, she had a lot of what she assumed to be dumb questions. Her instinct was to figure it out herself, until she realized just how life-changing accepting help and leaning on community could be. “When you realize that people want to help you and people have the answers and you kind of open yourself up, there's a lot of really good people that want to be in your corner, support you, and find what works for you.” It could just help you become an Ironman.
Photo courtesy of Sportogaf / Photo courtesy of Korupt Vision