It’s difficult, but not impossible to race Ironman on a budget. A lot of it depends on the kit you already own, how close you live to an event of your choice and whether you want to do a branded IRONMAN event or an independent race of the same distance.
First things first, this is an article which is a counterpart to a podcast I recorded on the subject, where I go into much more detail. In the podcast I break down a full budget, where in this article I focus more on money saving tricks. If you are trying to complete an Ironman on a budget, I HIGHLY recommend you give the podcast a listen.
Without further ado, let’s crack on with some money saving strategies.
Budget Ironman Wetsuit
The triathlon wetsuit is an obvious place to save money. Some wetsuits come in at the best part of £1000, which is excessive to say the least.
Most manufacturers have an entry level model, which in 2025 come in around the £200 mark. I HIGHLY recommend you stick with established triathlon brands for an Ironman wetsuit. If you are doing short races you can use pretty much any wetsuit you please, but getting a bargain basement wetsuit could be the difference between you being able to finish or not.
Established triathlon brands include (but are not limited to: Zone 3, HUUB, Orca, Zoot, Blue Seventy, AquaSphere and 2XU, in no particular order.
You might be able go save a bit of cash by going for a sleeveless wetsuit, but you really need to be sure the water you’re swimming in will be warm, otherwise you’ll get very cold indeed. In most cases, I recommend going for a full sleeve wetsuit.
Goggles
You don’t need photochromic lenses, different lenses to swap out or a screen that shows you how fast you are swimming. Get a cheap pair of open water googles with a tint in them to keep the worst of the sun out of your eyes when swimming outside. Expect to pay around £25, and to get a new pair ahead of race day.
Budget Ironman Bike
If you’re looking to race on a budget, you should be looking at the second hand market. You definitely want a road bike, unless you already own something like a gravel or touring bike which you can just stick some slick tyres on.
You don’t need something super light or with the latest tech, any road bike in good condition with at least ten gears should do the job, you may be able to get away with less if you are racing on a very flat courses where weight and gearing plays a much smaller part.
Just make sure your bike is in roadworthy condition, without any cracks in the frame or loose components. A cheap bike is the cornerstone of a budget Ironman.
Helmet
The amount you pay for a helmet has very little impact on the protection it offers. A £40 helmet will probably protect your head just as well as a £250 helmet. What you are paying for is comfort, weight and aerodynamics. A top end helmet will help you cut through the air much more efficiently, and you won’t even know you’re wearing it, while a very cheap helmet will feel like a giant, sweaty mushroom on your head.
Chain
A bit of an unusual one here. If we’re looking to complete an Ironman on a budget, we want to spend as little on replacement parts as possible. Imagine being a week out from your race, right at the edge of your budget, only to be told that your bike needs a new chainset, which will cost £100. Nightmare.
Your bicycle chain is the canary in your calming. If your chain starts to stretch but you replace it in time, you will be able to get tens of thousands of miles out of your bike. If you chain stretches and is not replaced however, it will damage other components such as your cassette and chainset.
You can learn about checking your chain for wear here: https://youtu.be/a0xdsTQaFtg?si=M0G3QTnIIzsTghE4
Cycle Clothing
The sky really is the limit when it comes to cycle clothing, you could spend hundreds on trendy jerseys and luxury bib shorts. There is also the practicality aspect, such as having clothing for the rain, wind and cold.
Most triathletes ride twice a week, in which case you can probably get away with having one cycle kit, as long as you stick it straight in the machine after your session and have a way of getting it dried. If you want to save on cold weather gear you can get an indoor trainer and only head out in warm weather where you don’t need additional layers. Is this ideal? No, but if it saves you hundreds in additional kit, it’s probably worth it.
Indoor Training
Nearly every triathlete will do some kind of indoor training. If the weather is bad, you live in a city, you need to ride at a specific intensity or want to simulate riding up a mountain, then an indoor trainer is an essential. They work by removing your rear wheel and placing it on the trainer, which will give you a power reading to measure your effort very accurately as well as talking to training software to simulate gradients.
You do not need a £1000 trainer, you can get very good ones new for around £400. I know this isn’t pocket change, but they have a relatively good resale value, so if you’re just looking to do a single Ironman event, you could sell it on after you finish, and only be £150-£200 out of pocket. Alternatively, you could look at the second hand market yourself, where you could grab something half decent for around the £200 mark.
You can get very cheap indoor trainers for much less than this, but I recommend against these. Rather than working by removing the rear wheel (which can be intimidating enough in itself), you simple place your bike on the trainer without removing anything.
This sounds really appealing, but the downside is that these trainers work by pressing the tyre against a metal drum to create resistance. This will chew right through your tyres, so you need to not only buy a new rear tyre, but you also need to change your tyre whenever you want to train indoors. Alternatively you could buy a second wheel with an indoor tyre on it, and change this wheel whenever you wanted to ride indoors.
As I’m sure you can see, between a new tyre and a new wheel, any savings you made on buying a cheaper “wheel on” trainer are starting to evaporate, and you are better going for a second hand “direct drive” trainer.
Tyres
This is one of those situations where a budget Ironman athlete has to spend to save. Simply put using cheap tyres with inner tubes is a false economy, as they are so prone to punctures, and you end up not only frustrated at constantly needing to change your tyre, but also spending £7 every time to buy a new inner tube.
By getting some better tyres, not only are you saving money on inner tubes, you are also improving your cycling speed, and improving your grip. More grip means less chance of crashing. Less crashes means less damage to your bike, which means less trips to the bike shop and less injuries for you!
I don’t recommend buying second hand tyres, so pop into your bike shop and see what they have in your price range. Check out our article on closing road tyres here.
Clip on aero bars
If you are looking to go fast, then a pair of clip on aero bars is a must. These can be picked up very cheaply (around £40), and will massively improve your efficiency when cycling. Forget aero helmets, deep section wheels and TT bikes, these will make you much faster for less.
Pedals and shoes
Mist road cyclists will use clip in pedals and shoes with compatible cleats. These allow to accelerate quickly without your feet flying off the pedals and make you more efficient, but are they essential? Absolutely not, plenty of people ride without cycling shoes. Will this make you the odd one out? Yes, but it doesn’t mean it can’t be done. If you’re really trying to save every penny possible, you can get round with flat pedals and trainers. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
Running shoes
I would recommend that you buy a proper pair of running shoes for your training, rather than simply using gym shoes or fashion trainers, the risk of injury is just too high.
However, you do not need to buy the latest carbon soled wonder shoe, nor do you need to replace your running shoes as often as the manufacturers tell you.
How quickly a shoe wears depends on your weight, running gait, surfaces you run on and more. Look at the tread wear on the bottom of the shoe, see how much the sole bends and most importantly how they feel on your feet before shelling out for a new pair. It ay be that you do need to replace them within the manufacturer’s guidelines, or it could be that you can get thousands of kilometres more out of them.
If you experience any kind of pain when running that doesn’t go away after a few runs, it could well be that the shoes are to blame, so I recommend a fresh pair if yours are well past their best.
Run clothing
You really don’t need anything special here. Some run specific socks on longer runs are a good idea to prevent rubbing, but a cheap pair of technical shorts and a T-shirt should do you just fine for most of the year. You may want some gloves, and maybe a long sleeve top and/or tights if you run in the middle of winter, but as we generate so much heat running, you don’t necessarily need to pour money into this, especially if you have access to a treadmill.
Fitness Watch
Training for an Ironman without a watch is challenging, but not impossible. The vast majority of people will use a watch to track their workouts so they can see their progression, and a watch is the best way to achieve this. Watches can also be used to follow structured workouts, alerting you when you go too slow or too fast.
If you look at some Garmin watches the prices will make your eyes water, you can spend over £1000. You do NOT need to drop this kind of money on a watch, in fact, most people who do will use it like they would a £100 watch, they won’t make use of all the top end features that set it apart.
The main trap you want to fall into is buying a watch that only does running, but other than that you should be fine. As long as it records swimming, cycling and running you’ll be fine. If you decide you want to get a power meter for your bike in years to come you may need to get a new watch which talk to power meters, but if we are trying to keep costs down as much as possible, we want to avoid paying for features we won’t use.
Tri suit
A trisuit is a one piece which you swim, cycle and run in. It’s designed to dry fast and provide aerodynamic benefits. However, it is also totally unnecessary and Ironman events.
Every branded Ironman event will have a changing room where you can change. Start the race with a swimming costume under your wetsuit, change into your cycling kit in the changing tent, then change into running kit for the run. You will lose some time, especially as there can be queues for the changing rooms, but you will save yourself a fair bit of cash, which is especially important if you plan on this being your first and last triathlon.
I own a tri suit, but chose to do a full change for my first race to be more comfortable on the bike.
Nutrition
Energy gels and other sports products are great, but they cost around £1 (or more), with each one delivering 30g of carbohydrate. If we’re training our body to digest 90g of carbs an hour, that’s £3 an hour. You can find yourself spending up to £15 for a five hour ride. Week after week, this will add up.
However, you don’t need to use sports nutrition. A bag of Haribo and some malt loaf could get you through a long ride. You could swap expensive electrolyte mixes for a pinch of salt and a squeeze of lemon. Simply dissolve some sugar and flavouring in water for make your own carbohydrate drink. Get creative with nutrition and lean on real foods to save hundreds.
Accommodation
Accommodation close to the finish line of a race is extortionate. Even if you get a good price a long way out, it’s not unheard of for your accommodation (especially in the case of Air BnB) to cancel your reservation and increase the price four fold, as they know someone will pay it.
The cheapest way to save money on accommodation is to camp, but for many this would be such a disrupted night of sleep that it would have a very real impact on their performance the next day.
My recommendation is to stay in a permanent facility such as a bed and breakfast or hotel that is 15-20 minutes from the start and/or finish line. The prices will be much more reasonable, and you won’t be too far from where you need to be either.
Travel
Unfortunately, there is only so much you can do to keep the cost down here, especially if you need to fly.
The cheapest way to get to the race venue is often to drive, so picking a race within driving distance would be ideal, but very few people live within a commutable distance of an Ironman event. If you do fly, don’t be tempted by stopovers or changes as this vastly increases the chance of your bike or race kit going missing.
Choose a non IRONMAN branded event
This may be heresy to some who have been wrapped up in the marketing that IRONMAN does, but they are just one company putting on events of this length. Your average IRONMAN race entry is around £550, but you could enter an independent event for perhaps 2/3 of that, maybe even half.
When you add up the costs of your entire journey, saving £200 or so may not seem like much, but if there is an independent long distance within driving distance for you, but you have to fly to get to your nearest IRONMAN, this saving could soon reach four figures.
Training plan
Is a training plan essential for completing an Ironman? No, it’s not. However, the alternative is doing all the research yourself, writing your own plan and hoping it works. You can’t afford to train randomly for an event of this length and difficulty. Getting the mix of intensity right while increasing volume sustainably is difficult.
Many will sign up, and in a supreme state of motivation train really hard until they injure themselves or burnout, lose weeks of good training and then try to squeeze in as much training as they can before race day. I can help you avoid this
If you’re reading this article and you’ve made it this far, money is tight, I get it. So I’d like to offer you 15% off of my training plans. These aren’t cobbled together by AI after scraping bad advice and conflicting schools of thought from questionable corners of the internet, these are written by a professional with a decade of coaching experience, starting from as little as £38 with your discount.
That’s not a lot of money to spend on something that could double your chances of finishing, and shave hours of off your finish time. Use the code ONABUDGET here to get started today.
