Jonas Colting
Welcome to episode eleven of the Low Tide Boyz, a Swimrun Podcast!
On this week’s show we chat with the legendary Jonas Colting. We were pretty star struck when we interviewed him while we were in Catalina for Ötillö but he was an awesome guest and we think that you’ll really enjoy the interview. More on this interview later in the show.
Our top story this week, and pretty much the top story in the world is COVID-19. In the Bay Area, where we live, we’ve been instructed to shelter-in-place for the next three weeks and local gyms and pools have closed. In addition, a bunch of races have been getting canceled around the world. While this is always a huge letdown, be kind to your race directors and listen to the medical and public health experts and basically do what they say. We will get through this together.
In other news, we’ve officially launched our collab shirt fundraiser for the WILD Youth Initiative created by WILD Swimrun. All proceeds from this apparel will go towards providing scholarships to help girls attend the WILD Swimrun camps. Have enough shirts (and/or pillows)? Head over to lowtideboyz.com to donate to the WILD Youth Initiative.
Let me just start by saying that our guest today has his own Wikipedia page. We are honored and humbled to have had the one and only Jonas Colting on the show today.
Jonas has won six World and European medals in triathlon and has been competing in the sport since 1991. He won the Ultraman World Championships in Hawaii twice. (For those that don’t know what that’s a 320 miles [515 kilometer for our metric system fans] three-day competition.) He’s also won the Ötillö world championship three times and is the only person who has done the race every year since its inception in 2006.
Jonas launched his own wetsuit company, Colting Wetsuits, in 2016 and his brand has been innovating swimrun-specific gear since the beginning.
We chatted with Jonas about the origins of swimrun, which interestingly the sport wasn’t even called that until about 6 years after the original Ötillö race took place. As mentioned above, Jonas has participated in every Ötillö World Championship. He told us the story of the original race and how the sport evolved into the Ötillö that we all know and love today. The first couple of years were pretty interesting as you will hear. The gear and style of the race has been pretty consistent since 2008. The race saw exponential growth every year and Jonas gives a lot of credit to Mats and Michael for their vision for what this sport could be.
We chatted about the first race in Ötillö in the U.S. and Jonas thinks that giving endurance athletes a new extreme physical challenge and a change of pace for triathletes that might be tired of doing the same races over and over. Jonas came to Catalina to support Ötillö’s expansion to the U.S. and raced the World Series distance race.
Jonas started developing his own wetsuit after not being satisfied with all the options out there. He cemented his idea to start his own brand in 2015 while he was doing a charity swim from Stockholm to Gothenburg (640K or 400 miles away!!!!) and raised over $100,000. During that swim he ended up mostly swimming without a wetsuit because nothing was working. He launched his own brand, Colting Wetsuits, in 2016.
We talked about the future of the sport and the hope to keep some of the grassroots feeling about the sport, including how wild and crazy the sport is. We all agreed about the values of the sport to take care about the environment and the friendliness of everyone that competes in the sport made the sport really unique. Basically a love fest about swimrun and its future.
You can follow Jonas Colting and Colting Wetsuits on Instagram.
That’s it for this week’s show. If you are enjoying the Löw Tide Böyz, please be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast player. We are on Apple Podcast, Spotify and Google Podcast. You can also follow along on Instagram and Twitter. You can also support us on Patreon, if you are so inclined. If you want to drop us a line, email us at lowtideboyz@gmail.com.