Urgent phone calls were being made as a shaken Lucy Charles-Barclay battled her rivals, brutal Hawaiian heat, intense thirst and gradual delirium taking over her mind and body at the marathon leg of the Ironman World Championships.
His coach, Dan Lorang, got a call from his wife watching TV at home in Germany that Charles-Barkley was looking bad and needed help. At the same time, her manager was watching in Australia and called her husband, Reese, to tell her to pull him out of the course.
It reached him just as an ambulance arrived on the scene. He was given sugary drinks and suffocated in ice, though doctors noted how strange it was that he wasn’t sweating, despite competing for six hours in sweltering conditions. He was taken for tests which revealed that he had lost just 2kg since the start of the race (he lost 6kg by the time he won the world title in 2023).
Despite his thirst, none of the symptoms point to heat stress, the most common cause of failure in a triathlete.
“At that point we were confused because we thought, well, what happened?” He says, talking to Independent A month later I was almost jogging an hour ago and now I’m in good shape.
He still went home to London looking for answers. A few days later, a call to 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 fall dangerously low. In the end, Charles-Barkley consumed too many isotonic drinks, which may have sent his body drastically in the other direction, from low salt levels to harmful load.
In the most severe cases, hyponatremia can cause organ failure. “Luckily Reese stopped me before I got to that point,” he says. “It confirmed that we had made the right decision, but it was also very frustrating – it seemed like such a simple thing that I couldn’t do.”
It was another failure in Charles Barkley’s career to add to the list. He finished runner-up four times at the iconic Kona course in Hawaii before finally becoming the world champion two years ago. Prior to that, she battled a string of unexplained injuries for years until a surprise diagnosis of celiac disease. The news was revolutionary and he arrived in Kona last month among the favourites, in the form of his life and determined to win his world crown after injury ruled him out last year.
Charles-Barkley was a swimmer in a previous life and this pedigree was shown in the opening leg, coming out of the water with a 90-second gap. However, he felt that something was not right. “I was very, very thirsty, which said, ‘Maybe I’ve swallowed some water in the sea and it’s a bit salty’… No matter how much I drank, I couldn’t shake the feeling of thirst the whole bike ride.”
He was caught by a rival after serving a one-minute littering penalty for accidentally dropping a water bottle, but he remained close to the front and took the lead again around 10km into the run.
“At that point in my mind, I was like, ‘I’ve won it now.’ I actually felt physically frozen.”
Television coverage showed Charles-Barkley beginning to veer across the road, like a drunk wandering out of a pub. I knew I was in trouble. I was thinking there is no way I can make it 10 miles back. [to the finish]this is a problem. “And finally my husband was there, and I know he’s going to tell me to stop, because deep down I know I have to stop — it’s not good.”
The decision to abandon the race seemed especially wise when American Taylor Knibb collapsed on the road an hour or so later with just two miles remaining in the 140.6-mile odyssey that is a full Ironman.
“It was really, really heartbreaking at the time, knowing everything we did, and I was still second in the race,” Charles Barkley said. “And you say, ‘Oh, if I could get back in, I’d probably still be in the top five.'” But it wasn’t worth it.
He returned home to recover and collect his account. He watched a few clips and noticed how anxious he looked on the road. Then, he went out and achieved perhaps the most extraordinary achievement of his career, in these conditions, winning the world half-iron title (70.3 World Championship) in Marbella just four weeks after he went off the road in Kona.
“We came to London and it’s cold, it’s wet, it’s gray compared to being in sunny Hawaii, and all of that makes it a lot more challenging. We also unfortunately lost Reese’s grandfather just less than two weeks after Kona, so it was a very difficult time for the family.
“I came into the race a little bit under the radar. People had already written me off and said there’s no way he can recover from that race in just four weeks. And I was like, ‘I’m not really going to say much on social media or anything, I’m just going to go to the race and see how I feel.’
It wasn’t the race he set out to win at the start of the year, but the victory tasted sweet. This time Reese was there for an emotional hug at the finish line.
“If I had won in Kona this year, it would have been amazing, I would have been really happy to have finished straight in Hawaii. But how I came back after that and won in Marbella, the amount of emotion I had running to that finish line was probably even more than when I won in Kona, just being able to turn it around and everything that happened leading up to it.”
There is still the T100 series grand final in Qatar in December, a match Charles-Barkley must win to jump from third to first in the standings and claim the title and six-figure prize money. Decisions have to be made on which races and series to target in 2026. But another sign of Kona’s frustration is that next year’s mission is clear: Charles-Barkley will give everything to win a second Ironman World Championship.
“I think a lot of people might have written me off, thinking he couldn’t perform in those conditions anymore, and he made a mistake, and who’s to say he won’t do it again? That’s always motivating for me. I enjoy trying to prove people wrong, and it takes a little bit of the pressure off. And while I feel like I really want redemption in Marbella.”
