Lionel Sanders reveals exactly what he needs for a shot at IRONMAN World Championship glory

In-form triathlon superstar Lionel Sanders believes winning an IRONMAN World Championship could still be possible, provided he can come up with a perfect performance of ‘absolute satisfaction’.

Buoyed by an impressive start to the 2025 season, which has already seen him pick up two IRONMAN 70.3 wins at Oceanside and St George, the 37-year-old Canadian is now plotting his path to Nice, France in September and another crack at his ultimate dream.

A two-time silver medalist, Sanders came agonisingly close to achieving his dream in 2017 when losing out to German powerhouse Patrick Lange by less than three minutes. It is that Kona experience which continues to drive him on eight years later.

Already toying with the idea of moving his family across from their Arizona home to prepare in the cooler Europe climate, the bid for a World title will also require a training schedule which taps into his mentality of consistently setting and meeting strict achievement goals.   

And if that 2017 defeat has taught him anything, it is the need to make sure such targets are as realistic as they are taxing. And he accepts that even if he can produce the ‘perfect’ race and it ends up not being good enough, then he may just call it quits.

The perils of insecurity

Talking on his latest YouTube training VLOG (watch the full version at the bottom of this article), he said: “I was flying high after Kona 2017 because it did seem so simple. I’d lost by about half a percent. And when you present it that way, you’re like ‘oh, I can do that. I can be half a percent better’.

“But it got into my head. I went to Oceanside in 2018 and Jan (Frodeno) outswam, outbiked and outran me. I literally threw everything out the window that I knew just because of that one race. That shouldn’t have any effect on me. That’s called insecurity. 

“So, I don’t know if I could call winning the World Championship a goal. It is a dream of mine but I try to balance having external goals and internal goals. Certainly in practice, you need to have a goal, because otherwise, what are you training for? But there are going to be many people who set goals in triathlon to win and fail. I’ve failed for many straight years trying to win the world title.

“I almost achieved it. In 2017, I almost did it. So it’s within the realms of possibility. It should be so hard that you don’t really know if you can do it. I don’t know if I can win. If I ever win, it will come as a surprise, but I know it will have taken literally everything in my being. That’s a goal that will push you for 15 years and make you reinvent yourself over and over and over again.” 

By breaking down his objectives into smaller chunks, he is able to compartmentalise the disappointments when things don’t quite go to plan. In order for him to achieve that ultimate dream of a World Championship, he believes the secret will be to set a series of mini goals that he feels will give him the edge when it comes to competing in France at the end of the summer.

For example, knowing that he will need a strong performance in the saddle, and feeling that he hasn’t quite had the power when required in the past, he has now reset his bike work to target 370 watts during a series of 10 to 12 five-minute training sprints. 

Lionel Sanders celebrates an epic victory at IRONMAN 70.3 Oceanside 2025 (Photo – Getty Images for IRONMAN).

The art of goal setting

“Saying you have that as a goal and actually doing the things required to make your goal a reality are two very different things,” he adds. “Talk is cheap. The key is setting a goal that is both meaningful and within the realms of possibility and actually working to achieve it. They also need to be challenging, really challenging. 

“If I can swim 24 low, if I can hold 370 on the bike and if I can run in that 1:08-low range off of that kind of a bike, then I know that is going to get me close to winning the world title. And if I do that and I finish fifth, I’m all good. I’m totally good. And then I’ll go back to the drawing board after, or I’ll be like, ‘that was everything’. 

“I hope to achieve that one day where I finish a race and I think to myself ‘that was everything, I gave everything’ then my work will be done. I want to be able to say ‘that was excellent, you trained excellent, you executed the race excellent and everything you did was excellent’.

“I will be happy with that, because that is all I can do. And if I never win the world title it’s all good. If I do all of that, and I believe I can come close to doing all of that, then it’s absolute satisfaction, and time for me to move on and coach people to one day experience the same thing.”