The Red Bulletin June 2019

Daniela Ryf
Daniela Ryf is amazingly
good at swimming,
cycling and running
fast, and incredibly bad
at swimming, cycling
and running slowly.
“I want to give it my
all every time I train,”
she says. “I only want
Daniela to give it her all in races,” her
Australian trainer Brett Sutton counters.
The search for a compromise has
been going on for five years. Every couple
of weeks, it escalates to shouting and
screaming. Ryf isn’t nicknamed ‘Angry
Bird’ for nothing. “She needs to learn to
focus her strengths,” Sutton has insisted
since 2015. “Nobody would beat her for
years.” But Ryf wants to do things the
hard way. “I can only get better when
I push myself to the limit,” she says.
But what really delivers success?
Strategic training or total commitment?
Maybe it’s the balance that comes from
this quest for a compromise. After all,
Ryf is the best female triathlete in the
world today. The 31-year-old from
the Swiss canton of Solothurn has won
every Ironman World Championship
since 2015. She has picked up four
Ironman 70.3 (half-distance triathlon)
World Championship titles, two Ironman
European Championship crowns, and
at last year’s Ironman World Champs
in Hawaii she set a new course record
of 8:26:18. Her trainer believes that,
given perfect conditions, Ryf could shave
another 15 minutes off her time. That
would place her in the men’s top 10.
And Ryf’s course record in 2018 was
attained in the face of crazy adversity: she
was stung by a jellyfish shortly before
the start, and handicapped by pain and
numbness during the swim (see page 40).
Who knows what time she could have
achieved in optimal conditions?
Is Ryf so successful because she can
put herself through the ringer like no one
else? Is it because she’s more talented,
trains harder and has greater willpower?
Possibly. But the Swiss triathlete has her
own secret for success: she doesn’t solve
problems, she uses them as a source of
energy. Here, Ryf provides six examples
of pain-driven power from her career…
Acts of nature teach
you patience
May 8, 2010, ITU World Championship, Seoul
The biggest win of her career at the
time, this triathlon saw Ryf produce an
explosive sprint finish to beat both the
world number one and the reigning world
champion and finally establish her place
among the global elite. But following
a relaxed victory celebration at a South
Korean club and a short stopover in
Singapore, she then endured the worst
flight of her life, spending most of the
10,300km journey to Zürich in the toilet.
From that day on, for almost two years,
Ryf battled persistent and careerthreatening
intestinal problems.
“I mostly suffered this deadening
fatigue,” she recalls. “But the constant
nausea was almost as bad. As soon as
I exerted myself in training, I had to throw
34 THE RED BULLETIN