Since I started Beyond The Line mid-2014, I have been coaching athletes online. Online coaching is specific, it attracts self-motivated athletes who often don’t need to be around other athletes to train. As a result, for years, I had my athletes training ‘in silos’, not knowing each other, only meeting occasionally at races, recognising each other thanks to our team gear. I personally value group training and I like interacting with people, and not only one-on-one, so I was scratching my head on how to create a community with athletes who are scattered all over Asia and who don’t necessary need company.

And then... COVID hit. Even before the first government restrictions hit us, I decided to ride mainly online, on ZWIFT. I immediately saw the potential on this ‘game’ that I had been using since 2015 (I was one of their beta users) but only occasionally, on rainy or polluted days. It all started with the relatively new ‘Stay Together Meet-Up’ functionality, where riders of different abilities stay together in the same peloton on the screen, even if the strongest riders put twice as more watts as the weaker ones. I originally invited only Beyond The Line athletes, who also quickly started to enjoy these group rides in such restrictive times. Very soon I was requested to open it up to other athletes, which I did, so much so that nowadays, Beyond The Line coached athletes are a minority in our group rides.

I organized a few low key duathlons with the bike leg happening on Zwift, a few threshold tests, while our Whatsapp group chat grew in size and in level of interactions. I also added a second weekly workout ride on Thursday, and then a third ride, a longer one, on Saturday. The community has expanded as some of these rides are now on the official Zwift calendar, meaning that anybody can see our programme and join from anywhere in the World.

Our rides have helped hundreds of athletes to stay sane in these difficult times. The most positively affected were those stuck in quarantine for up to 3 weeks. Our rides keep growing bigger and bigger and BTL has the largest presence on ZWIFT in Hong Kong, and -maybe- in Asia. What started as a personal experience that expanded to BTL coached athletes has now become a weekly, bi-weekly or tri-weekly rendez-vous with like-minded riders. And for some, it is the highlight of the week.

I am proud of what we have created, and it is still in its infancy.

I learnt to swim well at the age of 7 and started running occasionally at the age of 17 to release the stress from studying. At the age of 30 I started triathlon as I found that ‘mono-sport’ was getting boring. After 15 years of training for long distance triathlon, 10 full Ironman and 4 Ironman World Championship, I started to get a bit bored of triathlon too. Yes there was still ways to get faster, but the return on time and effort invested was getting less and less attractive, as the amount of training you need to do to gain a few minutes when you’re under 9h30 on a full Ironman started to feel like another job, and not a job that I was enjoying anymore. Besides, I was getting also tired of the ‘city’ aspect on triathlon, as I love swimming long and far (much further than in an Ironman) and I love trail running too.

One day, a friend of mine sent me a video on the Ötillö World Championship. Instantly, I knew this was a sport for me. Does it ever happen to you to have a gut feel that you WILL do something, no matter what? It happens to me a lot, and even if sometimes it takes me years to materialise the dream (like taking a year off to travel around the World with my wife in 2003, and idea that I first envisioned in 1993), I always align the stars to make it happen. Ötillö is the extreme version of the Swedish sport of Swimrun, a bit like Ironman is the extreme version of triathlon.

In Swimrun you run on trails, you swim in lakes/sea/rivers, and then you run, and swim, and run and swim etc. with no place to transition, meaning that you run with your goggles and swim with your shoes on. This is a hard sport where nature dictates everything, where carrying your gear requires creativity, where speed is not necessarily a driver, but a taste for challenge is. With a friend of mine, we first experimented Swimrun in Hong Kong in Dec 2016. We then created clinics and training sessions, and soon I was in charge of a growing Facebook group of like-minded athletes, linking with clusters from France and other countries in Europe. I personally ran several clinics in different areas of Hong Kong, sometimes with local triathlon clubs, sometimes under Beyond The Line. Soon I was approached by a race organiser and I became their consultant. We were lucky to run 7 or 8 races before the political climate and then COVID stopped everything.

The community of Swimrunners in Hong Kong is still small, but active. Hong Kong is a phenomenal place for it, with beautiful trails and plenty of access to the sea. Swimrun will grow, it is just a matter of time. I have made friends through this fringe sports that will stay for a long long time. And we are on the starting blocks, waiting for race authorisations to be granted again (as of May 2021).