Updated September 3, 2025 09:50AM
Cam Wurf's Insane Training Ride for the 2025 Ironman World Championship
Riding a 191-mile route around another country is just another training day for Cam Wurf as the Aussie gears up for the 2025 Ironman World Championship in Nice.
Pro cyclist turned triathlete Cameron Wurf prepares for the 2025 Ironman World Championship in Nice, France. (Photo: Sean M. Haffey/Ironman)
Cameron Wurf’s 13.5-hour, 191-mile Everesting loop on August 12 wasn’t an ultra-endurance race. In fact, it wasn’t even the longest training ride he’s ever posted on Strava. The ride wasn’t a bucket-list goal or anything that required a taper. It was simply the middle of August, and Wurf wanted an adventure.
The 42-year-old Australian pro triathlete likes to keep himself moving. It doesn’t matter if it’s on a bike, on the run, or in the water, Wurf can hardly keep still, even after completing a massive workout. (Case in point: the day after the above-mentioned ride, Wurf ran 13 miles and swam 3,250 meters.) In 2023, he famously ran a half-marathon (at 6:36 min/mile pace) just after finishing Paris-Roubaix. And in 2022, he ran a 2:55 marathon around his neighborhood in Santa Monica, California.
It makes sense, then, that his training for this year’s 2025 Ironman World Championship included an entire lap of Andorra, a small country located in the Pyrenees Mountains, in between France and Spain. In true Wurf style, he posted the ride to Strava with the title: “Keeping myself busy while the inlaws [sic] are intown [sic].”
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![An image of a recent Strava workout Cam Wurf completed with the caption: "Keeping myself busy while the inlaws [sic] are intown [sic]."](https://cdn.triathlete.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Keeping-myself-busy.png?width=615)
Cam Wurf on seeking adventures in training
Wurf tells Triathlete his training approach for Nice is part focus, part fun. The ride was part of Wurf’s preparation for the men’s 2025 Ironman World Championship in Nice, France, which features a 112-mile bike course that is considered one of the hardest in triathlon. Winding through the Alpes-Maritimes region, the course includes 2,400m of elevation gain and looks more like a hiking trail than a road course.
That’s why Wurf’s training adventure was a key part of his preparation. The distance and duration of the ride could make the Nice course seem easy, and he feels those training efforts help him build the mental strength to take on the challenges of race day.
“I’m never afraid of the distance because I’ve done so many times in training,” the former Tour de France cyclist says, “and it’s always been some sort of adventure.”
The fun came in designing a route that circled Andorra, making it all the way to the north, south, east, and west borders of the country in a single day. Wurf’s Strava map looks like some sort of GPS error, with hundreds of squiggly lines and hardly a single loop – which is how Wurf likes it. Accidentally, Wurf also casually completed an “Everesting” during the ride and then some, climbing 1,100 meters more than the official elevation gain of Mount Everest.
How Andorra prepared Cam Wurf for the Ironman World Championship in Nice
The Ironman World Championship bike course in Nice features countless twists and turns, ups and downs, and tight switchbacks along the 112-mile route. It is a course perfectly-suited for a former professional cyclist – someone who will gain time in the corners and descents when pedaling isn’t even a factor.
The Nice course includes a long climb to Gourdon, followed by a rolling plateau for the next 35 miles. The longest descent of the day begins at Mile 70, immediately followed by a short and steep climb to Coursegoules, and then a longer stepped descent for the next 15 miles. This will be the perfect area for technically-savvy cyclists to recover before the final 10-mile stretch into Nice, with 90 corners and 15 switchbacks between miles 80 and 100.
Wurf’s epic ride in Andorra is not too dissimilar from the Nice bike course. First, there are hundreds of corners and switchbacks littered throughout each route. If you were to tell a cyclist, “Go practice your descending skills,” Wurf’s route covers the exact roads that you would send them to. With average gradients between 5% and 10%, the descents are incredibly fast, and many are quite technical. If anything, the descents in Andorra are even faster and scarier than the bike course’s in Nice.
“I have a really low tolerance for crashing now”
However, Wurf’s bike handling skills don’t make him a shoo-in to dominate the Nice bike course. At 42 years old, he’s noted a few things that have changed over the years.
“I have a really low tolerance for crashing now,” he says. “I do not want to crash.”
It’s an interesting conundrum, the butting heads of Wurf’s cycling experience and his unwillingness to take risks. Wurf certainly knows how to handle his bike, but there are plenty of other racers who are willing to take more risks, including former Ironman World Champions like Norway’s Kristian Blummenfelt or Frenchman Sam Laidlow, plus current iron-distance record holder Magnus Ditlev of Denmark.
In 2023, Wurf had a disappointing bike split on the Ironman World Championships course in Nice. He actually lost time to his rivals on the descents, the opposite of what many believed would be the case. “Lack of preparation caught me out,” he says. “We were on the descent, and at least I would have had a chance to be in the race. But obviously, falling on my back, I really felt that in the run.
When asked which world championship course suits him the best, Kona or Nice, Wurf pauses. “I think both of them suit me really well,” he says. “They’re both hard for different reasons. Obviously, Nice is hard because of the bike course, and Kona is hard because of the heat… And it’s obvious that I just handle a hard race well. A race that puts fatigue into the body of the entire field, it tends to bring me more towards the top. “
Wurf also doesn’t mince words when it comes to his weakness: “I just really need to get on top of that swim if I want to give myself a chance of really having a chance in both races,” he says, alluding to what he called an “embarrassing” swim at last year’s men’s Ironman World Championship in Kona. Still, that race ended with a seventh-place finish in 7:51:56, showing that Wurf can overcome a bad start – though it’s clear he’d much rather be in the mix from the beginning.
Finding balance in triathlon training
Though Wurf encourages triathletes to seek out adventures in training, he also offers a word of caution.
“I’ve been doing this for a lot of years. And I’ve enjoyed doing long days of training since I was 15-16 years old. So for over 25 years, I’ve been putting that stuff in the body,” Wurf says. “So it’s one thing for people to copy what I do on a daily basis, but they don’t understand what was done in the past.”
Even though he’s known for epic adventures, Wurf says he’s evolved in his training approach during his 40s. “From a personal perspective, I’ve been much smarter this year in when I don’t need to train hard, I don’t train hard. And when I do need to train hard, I go, and I really go. And that has probably been my biggest change more recently.
As I get older, it’s very easy to get used to just grinding out the days. I am definitely doing more speed work, more harder work, and much more easy work. I actually rarely operate at the intensities at which we race on.”
Wurf has also learned when to say when. Back in March, Wurf traveled to Australia for Ironman 70.3 Geelong. He got food poisoning in the lead-up to the race, and then 24 hours before the start, he discovered (as he put it) that his “Di2 [electronic bike shifting] was fried.”
Instead of giving up, Wurf made the most of what he had: “I can at least get a chance to test my swim that I’ve worked really hard on over the winter,” he says of his pre-race reasoning. “I’ll get through the bike with one gear the best I can… I think my peak cadence was 150 RPM. It’s a great opportunity to do the run and do the swim, and I just have to get through the bike in the middle.”
How to train like Cam Wurf
Wurf’s wild training stories have some important takeaways for age-group triathletes. Whether you are a former runner, a seasoned racer, or a first-time Ironman athlete, here’s what you can learn from the world of Cameron Wurf.
Training doesn’t have to be perfect
In the modern era, where everything is weighed, calculated, and measured to the nearest decimal point, it is easy to get lost in the numbers. But those numbers will never be perfect, and it’s important to realize that.
A happy athlete is a fast athlete
Rather than getting bogged down in the numbers, remember to have some fun. Whether that means doing a 191-mile ride like Wurf, or taking an extra rest day to spend time with your family, focus on the things that truly matter.
At the end of the day, age is just a number
“No one cares how old you are,” Wurf says. “If you have the right to be there, and you are there, then you have a chance of, you know, trying to win the thing. Doesn’t matter if you’re young or old. I don’t even think about that part. I’m only thinking about how to beat these guys.”
