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As a swaying Lucy Charles-Barclay battled against her rivals, the brutal Hawaiian heat, intense thirst and the gradual delirium gripping her mind and body on the marathon leg of the Ironman World Championship, urgent phone calls were being made.
Her coach, Dan Lorang, received a call from his wife watching on TV at home in Germany to tell him Charles-Barclay looked in a bad way and needed help. At the same time, her manager was watching in Australia and called her husband, Reece, telling him to go and pull her off the course.
He got to her just as a medical car arrived on the scene. She was given sugary drinks and was smothered in ice. Medics noted how odd it was that she was not sweating, despite having competed in searing conditions for six hours. She was taken for tests and they found her weight had dropped only 2kg since the start of the race (she lost 6kg when she won the world title in 2023).
Despite how thirsty she felt, none of the signs pointed to heat stress, the most common cause of a triathlete breaking down.
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“At that point we were confused because we were like, well, what has happened then?” she says, speaking to The Independent a month on. “An hour ago I was almost about to collapse running, and now I’m in pretty good shape.”
She flew home to London still searching for answers. A few days later, a call with a leading heat-stress doctor for the London Marathon revealed a possible explanation: hyponatremia, caused by drinking so much water that the body’s salt levels drop dangerously low. In the end, Charles-Barclay took on so many isotonic drinks she may have sent her body violently in the other direction, from low levels of salt to a harmful overload.
At its most severe, hyponatremia can trigger organ failure. “Luckily Reece stopped me before I got to that point,” she says. “It confirmed we had made the right decision, but also it was so frustrating – it feels like that was such a simple thing I could have just not done.”
It was another setback in Charles-Barclay’s career to add to the list. She finished runner-up four times around Hawaii’s iconic Kona course before eventually becoming world champion two years ago. Before that she had spent years battling a string of inexplicable injuries until a surprise diagnosis of coeliac disease. The news was transformative and she arrived at Kona last month among the favourites, in the shape of her life and determined to win back her world crown after injury denied her last year.
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Charles-Barclay was a swimmer in a previous life and that pedigree showed in the opening leg, emerging from the water with a 90-second lead. Yet she had sensed something wasn’t right. “I felt very, very thirsty, which I was like, ‘Maybe I’ve swallowed some water in the sea and it’s a bit salty’ … I couldn’t get rid of that feeling of thirst the entire bike ride, no matter how much I drank.”
She was caught by a rival after being made to serve a one-minute littering penalty for accidentally dropping a water bottle, but she was still near the front and re-took the lead around 10km into the run.
“At that point in my mind, I was like, I’ve won it now. And then literally within a mile or two I was like, ‘Oh, I really don’t feel good.’ I actually felt physically freezing.”
TV coverage showed Charles-Barclay begin to veer all over the road, like a drunk stumbling home from the pub. “I knew I was in trouble. I was like, ‘There’s no way I can make the 10 miles back [to the finish], this is a problem’. And then eventually my husband was there, and I know he’s going to tell me to stop, because deep down I know I do need to stop – this is not good.”
The decision to abandon the race looked particularly wise when the American Taylor Knibb collapsed on the road an hour or so later with only two miles left of the 140.6-mile odyssey that is a full Ironman.
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“It was really, really heartbreaking at the time, knowing all the work we put in, and I was still second in the race at that point,” Charles-Barclay says. “And you’re like, ‘Oh, if I could just hobble back in, I’m probably going to still finish in the top five’. But it was just not worth it.”
She returned home to recover and take stock. She watched back some clips and realised just how distressed she looked on the road. Then, she went out and produced perhaps the most extraordinary achievement of her career, in the circumstances, winning the half-Ironman world title (the 70.3 World Championship) in Marbella only four weeks after being pulled off the road in Kona.
“We came home to London and it’s cold, it’s wet, it’s grey compared to being in sunny Hawaii, and all of that makes it a lot more challenging. We also unfortunately lost Reece’s granddad just under two weeks after Kona, so that was a really tough time for the family.
“I went into the race a little bit under the radar. People had already written me off, saying there’s no way she can recover from that race in only four weeks. And I was like, ‘I won’t really say much on social media or anything, I’ll just turn up to the race and see how I feel’. I really wanted to do well because I felt like the family needed it, my whole team needed it.”
It was not the race she planned to win at the start of the year, but victory tasted sweet. This time, Reece was there for an emotional hug at the finish line.
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“If I had won in Kona this year it would have been amazing, I would have been really happy running down that finish straight in Hawaii. But how I then came back and won in Marbella, the amount of emotion and excitement I had running to that finish line was probably even more than if I won in Kona, just being able to turn it around and everything that had happened in the lead up.”
There is still the grand finale of the T100 series in Qatar to come in December, a race Charles-Barclay must win to jump from third to first in the standings and scoop the title and six-figure prize money. There are decisions to be made about which races and series to target in 2026. But one more silver lining from the disappointment of Kona is that next year’s mission is abundantly clear: Charles-Barclay will put everything into winning her second Ironman World Championship.
“I think a lot of people may have written me off, thinking actually she can’t perform in those conditions anymore, and she got it wrong, and who’s to say that she won’t do that again? So that, for me, is always motivating. I do enjoy trying to prove people wrong, and it takes a bit of pressure off. And whilst I feel like I very much did get redemption in Marbella, I want redemption in Kona.”
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