About Me

I grew up in France with asthma that ruled out most of the sports other kids played. No football clubs, no athletics, nothing that required sustained running in cold air. What I could do was swim — there’s water everywhere in France, and the local pool became my default. I fenced for a while. Played tennis. Skied in winter because that’s what French families do. And I rode a bike, because every kid in France has a bike. It’s in our DNA, reinforced every July by the Tour de France.
As a teenager, I went through desensitisation treatment. It took a long time and a lot of injections, but by my early twenties the asthma was behind me. I haven’t had an asthma attack since. That opened a door I’d assumed was permanently closed: endurance sport.

The first sport I threw myself into wasn’t triathlon. It was volleyball. I played competitively in England for several years and reached NVL1 — the top division of the National Volleyball League. At my peak, I was roughly in the top 120 volleyball players in the UK.
I loved it. But there’s a ceiling you hit in a team sport when the league structure, the travel, and the time commitment start to outweigh the progression. By 2010, I’d reached that ceiling. I didn’t want to stop competing — I wanted a sport I could keep pushing in on my own terms, on my own schedule, for as long as my body would let me.

It started with a colleague at work who was part of St Albans Tri Club. She invited me to a “fun” swim-run one Wednesday morning before work. I set my alarm for 5 am, showed up at the pool, and did breaststroke while everyone else did front crawl. I was that rusty in the water.
Something about it stuck. A few months later, I entered my first triathlon — a sprint-distance race in Bedford with a pool swim. I don’t remember my time. I remember the feeling of finishing something that combined three disciplines, and the realisation that the swimming, the cycling, and the competitive drive I’d built across years of other sports had quietly been preparing me for this.
Sprint distances became Olympic distances. Olympic became half-distance. Half-distance became a habit. By the mid-2010s, I was racing 70.3s at Castle Chantilly and Les Sables in France, finishing around 5h30 and gradually learning what I didn’t know about nutrition, pacing, and the gap between training well and racing well.
I never set out to race IronMan. That came later, and only after I’d changed how I ate.

In late 2020, I watched The Game Changers on Netflix, read Rich Roll’s Finding Ultra, and watched Cow on BBC. Three sources, three different angles. By the end of 2020, I’d switched to a fully plant-based diet.
The full story of that transition — what triggered it, how I approached it, where The Game Changers got it right and wrong, and what five years of racing data actually show — is on my Why I Race Plant-Based page.
The short version: my 70.3 times dropped from around 5h30 to consistently under five hours. My entire IronMan career has been plant-based. And my best IronMan — Challenge Roth in 2024, 10h10 — came four years after the switch.

I’d never raced a full IronMan distance as an omnivore. Every one of my five IronMan finishes has been on a plant-based diet:

IronMan Nice 2022 — my first full distance, 11h17
JurassicMan 2022 — IronMan distance along the Jurassic Coast
Long Course Weekend Wales 2023 — IronMan distance spread across three days in Tenby
Challenge Roth 2024 — 10h10, my best ever, on the famously fast Bavarian course
IronMan Cascais 2025 — 11h57, six months after breaking my collarbone

You can see the full history on my race results page — sixteen years of times, distances, and finish positions.

I work in tech. The blog isn’t my livelihood — it’s a hobby that got out of hand. I write because I wish this content had existed when I started racing, and because the plant-based endurance space is full of either missionary zealots or dismissive sceptics, with very little honest middle ground.
Everything on this site is written around a full-time job, family life with my wife and daughter, and a training schedule built around working from home. I’m not an early bird. I run at lunchtime. I ride or do workout sessions while everyone else is stuck in commuter traffic. On weekends I try to get out of the house by 9 am. Morning swims happen when they happen — I won’t pretend they’re consistent. It’s not a glamorous schedule, but it works.
If you’re reading this as someone who fits training into the gaps rather than building life around training, you’re the person I’m writing for.
I’ve been lucky to train with good people and better coaches. I started with EVO, moved to Berkshire Tri Squad, and have worked with three coaches over the years — Mathias, a friend from university in France, then Pablo, and now Nathalie. Each one changed something about how I race.

Oli le triathlete started as a way to keep race reports in one place. It’s grown into something broader: training guides, nutrition pieces, gear reviews, race-day strategies, and the occasional honest reflection on what age-group triathlon actually involves when you strip away the Instagram highlights.
A few things about how I write:
I use AI tools to help draft and structure content, but every fact, every race time, every supplement recommendation is verified by me personally. If I haven’t tested it or raced it, I don’t write about it. The Iron and B12 guide reflects my actual blood test results. The race-day nutrition piece reflects what I actually eat before and during races. The race reports are written from finish-line notes, not memory.
I’m not a nutritionist, a coach, or a medical professional. I’m a competitive age-group athlete with sixteen years of racing data and five years of plant-based experience. Take what’s useful, ignore what isn’t, and always check with someone qualified before making health decisions.

Oli le triathlete. It’s French, obviously — “le” instead of “the” because I am French, and it stuck. I moved to the UK in March 2003. First to St Albans, now to Bracknell. Over twenty years here. Long enough to call it home, not quite long enough to understand cricket. I’ve been Oli to most people since arriving, and “le triathlete” felt more natural than “the triathlete” for someone who still speaks English with a French accent (and French with an English one).

If you’re new here, three good starting points:

Why I Race Plant-Based — the full story of switching, what changed, and what didn’t
My Race Results — sixteen years of times and finishes
What I Wish I Knew Before My First Ironman — the broader lessons for anyone considering long-course

You can also find me on Instagram and LinkedIn — links are in the footer.