München – The two-time Ironman World Champion Patrick Lange has set himself the goal of starting at the World Championships in Hawaii at the beginning of October after his shoulder injury.
The 35-year-old triathlete said in an interview with the Munich Merkur tz media group that he was going to miss the World Championships on May 7th in St. George, USA. “But Hawaii is our place of longing,” explained the 2017 and 2018 world champion.
In the US state of Utah, Hawaii will make up for the 2021 World Cup next weekend. In the past two years, the world championships on the Big Island had been canceled due to the corona pandemic. In addition to Lange, the three-time champion Jan Frodeno is also missing in St. George due to a partial tear in the Achilles tendon.
Lange suffered a shoulder joint rupture in a bicycle accident in February and had to take a break for several weeks. The rehabilitation is going much faster than anyone expected. And also much faster than the textbook predicts. “Full-throttle training can start again in the next few weeks. I’m very happy,” Lange said.
He wants to make his comeback on July 3rd at the Challenge in Roth if everything goes well. There was still a hard road ahead of him, he confessed. “Before that, I still have to invest a fair amount of time in training so that I can compete in top form. It’s a challenge I gladly accept. I’m really keen on it. I use this motivation and pull through,” said Lange. In Roth, like an Ironman race, the long distance is 3.8 kilometers of swimming, 180 kilometers of cycling and the marathon distance of 42.195 kilometers.