News & Racing

Luke McKenzie pulls out of Kona Ironman World Championships

One of Australia's bright hopes for the Kona World Championship race on Saturday has withdrawn due to injury. Writing on his blog Luke today said "I have withdrawn from the Ironman World Championships here in Kona. It has been a gut wrenching decision but after a few days of deliberation

Karl Hayes

Oct 7, 2010 — 2 min read

One of Australia’s bright hopes for the Kona World Championship race on Saturday has withdrawn due to injury. Writing on his blog Luke today said “I have withdrawn from the Ironman World Championships here in Kona. It has been a gut-wrenching decision but after a few days of deliberation, I think I have made a wise decision?!

I have been battling an SI joint issue since I had a mechanical mishap at the Cancun Ironman 70.3 a few weeks ago. The initial incident occurred when I hit a clump of dried concrete on the road at full speed and my seat bolt snapped from the forward pressure I had on it and caused my saddle to rock back and forward through most of the bike leg. I ran with a little pain during the run of that race but just put it down to “tightness” from the foreign position. I spent my first few days in Kona treating with massage and it appeared to be healing fine.

After some hard sessions around the weekend of the 25th and 26th I starting to see some signs of pain again and scaled back my training and focused on treating it but unfortunately on Tuesday 5th and Wednesday 6th I was literally bedridden because my lower back was killing me so much. The remainder of that week focused on treatment and I was able to get some swimming and riding done by the next weekend at a steady state. In hindsight, this is no doubt where I did further damage. I was sure with the treatment and my ability to still swim and ride that my running would follow soon after (wrong). This week (race week) I had to stop training again altogether and began spending 4-6hrs a day treating it. I was determined to be on the start line and continued planning is if I was racing. Yesterday I attempted to run for the first time in almost 10 days and literally couldn’t take a step on it (I almost collapsed with the pain). So after spending hours talking it over with Amanda, my family and sponsors I made the call to withdraw from the race to prevent further injury.

I know I was in great form and ready for a big race here but I don’t want to put myself out for an extended period of time if I can get it right and race at 100% at a late season Ironman. I don’t want to put all this hard work in to be here and only be at 50% and then also potentially put myself out of other races.

“Ironman’s are like a McDonald restaurant …. there is always another one around the corner”

“Life goes on … I will be back smarter and hungrier in 2011!”