"Ironman Alaska"

Ironman Alaska has canceled plans to hold events in Juneau over the next two years. 

Liz Perry, president and CEO of Travel Juneau, said the Ironman Alaska triathlon organizer called her to say that the decision arose from economic concerns like inflation and the potential for a recession. 

“We have not burned any bridges with them,” Perry said. “They are ever so grateful to the community of Juneau for everything that we did for them, and they want to keep that door open for the possibility of a future event.”

This summer’s Ironman event was the first of its kind in Juneau, according to Perry. About 850 athletes from around the country arrived and competed in driving rain. 

While that was fewer than the original estimate, the event did end up bringing in an estimated $8 million to the local economy between the hotels, food and other things paid for by visitors who came to town for the event. 

Housing for all the visitors was a concern leading up to the race. Some athletes also struggled to get their bikes to Juneau in time for the race, but locals stepped up to help. 

Perry said she’s disappointed about the decision, but the possibility remains for Ironman to return in the future once the economy improves. The fact that Juneau proved it can host an event of this scale also means there’s potential for similar events. 

“It kind of opens the door for us to keep an eye out for, you know, similar events. And whether they are athletic events or other kinds of events that the town has the capacity to put on,” she said. 

Travel Juneau paid $50,000 for licensing for this year’s event. Perry said they had a contract with Ironman for the 2023 and 2024 races but had not made any payments yet.

Funny thing about people who subject themselves to swimming in 56-degree water, biking 112 miles in the rain and running a marathon on the same day: they grin as they talk about it.

“It was wet all the way, pouring down, rain was pouring,” said Joseph Paray, a registered nurse from New York who completed his first full Ironman triathlon in Juneau last Sunday. “The wind was brutal. The elevation of the climb is brutal.”

His friend Richard Secretaria, a medical tech from New Jersey, was also a finisher. He was almost giddy as Paray talks about it. Secretaria said his bike got so dirty, it looked like he was mountain biking instead of racing on the road.

It almost sounds like they’re complaining, but they really enjoyed their time in Juneau. In part because they said they were representing the Philippines when they raced. When they first arrived, they introduced themselves on an Ironman Alaska Facebook group.

“Everybody’s sending us messages, like, ‘How can we meet each other?’ Like, we feel like we’re celebrities here,” Secretaria said, laughing.

“The support of the Filipino communities in Juneau? They rock, man,” Paray said. “It was like it was like back home. They were everywhere!”

Of course, they’re supporting Juneau, too, with their visit. Last year, when a local travel organization was negotiating to host the Ironman Alaska triathlon, boosters predicted up to 1,500 athletes would come, plus friends, family and support staff. It would be an economic boon.

The number of people to actually attempt the inaugural Ironman Alaska ended up falling well short of that. Ironman said there were 850 athletes, of whom 62 were locals.

And yet, another early estimate — that the event would pump $7 to $9 million into the local economy — appears to be on the money.

Like most of the athletes, Paray and Secretaria didn’t come alone. An Ironman official said that on average, each participant brought about three people with them. Paray and Secretaria brought their significant others, and they were here for seven nights.

The two couples split a hotel room and car rentals that they booked early on, before registration for the race had even opened. At first, they booked six nights, but later decided to add a seventh. By then, the per-night rate had doubled to almost $350.

Besides Ironman events, they visited the Mendenhall Glacier, rode the Goldbelt Tram and ate at local restaurants.

“Not to mention, you still have to buy, you know, some stuff. You know, souvenirs,” Secretaria said.

“Souvenirs, yeah!” Paray said. “You’ve been to Alaska! You need some remembrance.”

They figure each couple spent around $4,000 on the trip.

City Finance Director Jeff Rogers was also an Ironman finisher. On Monday, he was browsing the swag at a pop-up shop at Centennial Hall.

“I got a jacket and a hat, ‘cause the hat I run in is falling apart, and a couple of water bottles,” Rogers said.

The cashier rang him up for just under $200, which includes about $10 of city sales tax.

From hosting Ironman, Rogers is expecting a noticeable bump in the city’s revenue from sales tax and the extra 9% tax on hotel rooms and short-term rentals.

“I think a big weekend of a couple thousand people in town certainly has an impact, not only on city revenue but just on the health of local businesses. And certainly a lot of people rented out their houses, trying to help and be generous, but also put a little money in their pockets,” he said. “So I think the economic impact will be big.”

City officials and race organizers aren’t aware of any formal economic impact studies underway around the event. But Meilani Schijvens, who runs the economic publications firm Rain Coast Data in Juneau, was personally interested in the race. She had the athlete tracking app, was following threads about it on Facebook and was game to share a rough economic impact estimate of her own.

“To be clear, I have not done a study on this, right?” she said. “These are just my numbers, because I obsess over all these things, and I love, like, trying to figure these things out.”

But she has done robust analyses in the past, backed by surveys and more ground-truthing, to get at what the typical independent traveler spends during a visit. To build some spending assumptions for this event, Schijvens looked at the Ironman schedules, participant numbers, Facebook chatter — even the weather.

“A typical independent traveler, we would assume they all went on an excursion,” Schijvens said. “And I just decided 20% of them went on excursions, partly because we had an atmospheric river. And a lot of the excursions were closed down, like the helicopter tours people definitely would have gone on.”

All together, she figures the out-of-town participants and their travel companions put roughly $8 million directly into Juneau’s economy.

The race organizers also spent a lot in the community. Liz Perry runs Travel Juneau, the city’s destination marketing organization. It partnered with Ironman to host the event.

Perry said the Ironman organizers used local vendors as much as possible, from the logo design by local artist Crystal Kaakeeyáa Worl to the port-a-potties from Alaska Waste.

Which means some of the athletes’ registration fees and the licensing fee Travel Juneau paid Ironman to host the event also came back to the community. Travel Juneau paid $50,000 this year, and will pay $125,000 in 2023 and again in 2024.

Perry said volunteers representing local nonprofits may also get some cash grants from the Ironman Foundation. And there were a lot of volunteers — Ironman said more than 1,400.

“So the entire community has benefitted from this, from top to bottom,” Perry said. “So that ripple effect is going to be really impactful for the whole city.”

There’s even free word-of-mouth from all the proud Ironman participants themselves. Paray and Secretaria both said they plan to come back.

“Maybe not for the race, but for vacation,” Paray said. “Yeah, this is a must. I must tell my friends, I will tell everyone who I meet, ‘Yeah, go to Juneau, go to Alaska. It’s a really nice place.’”

They said their triathlon club back home is eager to hear how it went.

Registration for next year’s Ironman Alaska triathlon in Juneau opens Aug. 15.

Sunday’s race in Juneau was the first Ironman triathlon in Alaska. More than 700 athletes finished the race.

The first across the finish line was Alex Whetman of Riverton, Utah. It took him 9 hours, 11 minutes, 17 seconds to swim 1.2 miles in Auke Lake, bike 112 miles on Glacier Highway and run a full 26-mile marathon through the Mendenhall Valley.

Liz Cullen of Gibson, British Columbia, was the top female finisher with a time of 10 hours, 23 minutes, 3 seconds.

The first person from Juneau to finish was Will Coleman, who was 14th overall. Beth Gollin was Juneau’s first female finisher and 13th female overall.

John Bursell was Juneau’s second finisher. He has completed several Ironman races in the past, and met his goal this time to qualify for the Ironman World Championship event in Hawaii in October.

“It was a great experience overall,” he said. “I think Ironman did a great job. I was super-impressed and proud of Juneau. You know, the way people turned out – the support was incredible, the volunteers were incredible. And we heard that over and over again from people who came from out of town to compete. This was basically the most supportive community they’ve ever raced in.”

Bursell says locals volunteered, loaned out their own personal bikes, opened up their homes to house athletes, even offered free car rides around town. According to a press release from Ironman, more than 1,400 people volunteered.

The event had a lot of challenges. Race officials cut the swim portion in half, due to the cold water temperatures in Auke Lake.

Before the race even began, logistics issues drove down turnout. In a press release, Ironman said “approximately 1,000” athletes came to Juneau for the event. An official list dated from April had identified more than 1,300 participants.

Juneau’s destination marketing organization, Travel Juneau, worked closely with race organizers. Executive Director Liz Perry says there will be a full debrief to work on making the second Ironman Alaska event go smoother. Perry says there’s a three-year contract, meaning Ironman Alaska will be back in Juneau in 2023 and 2024.

Juneau is scheduled to get soaked this weekend. The National Weather Service office says they expect the area to get 2.5 inches of rain on average across the Juneau area, so they’re calling for 1 to 3 inches.

“One part of town might get the 1 inch and another part of town might get the 3 inches,” said forecaster Nicole Ferrin. “That’s pretty standard to see a variety across the area.”

The system will come in two waves. Heavy rain will fall Friday night, but then there should be a break with lighter rain early on Saturday morning before picking up again on Saturday afternoon.

The storm is expected to move out on Saturday night.

But that doesn’t mean the forecast for the Ironman Alaska race on Sunday will be high and dry. The forecast is for off-and-on showers, with the heaviest showers coming in the morning.

“We often see some breaks form over Lynn Canal,” said Ferrin. “So perhaps the end of the road could see some sunny breaks in the afternoon, moreso than, say, the back of the valley.”

This weekend’s rain event is the result of an atmospheric river — a long, fat column of moisture aloft that looks a lot like a river in satellite imagery. It hitches a ride on the jet stream, which directs it right at Southeast Alaska.

Local rivers and streams will rise with the heavy rain, but Ferrin says we’re fortunate that we had a break from the rain for a few days ahead of this storm.

“A lot of our rivers and lakes were able to fall over the past two days,” she said.

Most of the time when Juneau sees flooding, the days before are really wet and the ground is already saturated. So, Ferrin says rivers could approach bank-full this weekend but aren’t likely to flood.

Temperatures will be in the mid to upper 50s on Saturday and Sunday. By Tuesday, Juneau might see some sun again.

If you browse websites like Airbnb and Vrbo for overnight rentals in Juneau, there are dozens and dozens of listings. Many have only a handful of reviews or none at all, suggesting they only recently went on the market as vacation rentals.

City officials are concerned these listings may be eating into Juneau’s already very limited housing stock.

On Monday, the Juneau Assembly approved spending $20,000 to hire a third-party firm to collect data about this market.

“We think of those third-party services principally as reconnaissance,” City Finance Director Jeff Rogers said during an Assembly Finance Committee meeting last month. “They’re snooping, crawling the web, looking at rentals, trying to see how often those rentals are rented, what the approximate rates are. There’s some work that most of those companies do on the backend to line up a rental listing with a parcel and potentially with an owner.”

In the latest business climate survey commissioned by the Southeast Conference, business leaders in the region identified a lack of affordable housing as the top barrier to economic growth. It directly contributes to labor shortages.

The Assembly has also been considering mandating that operators of short-term rentals register their properties with the city. Together, these may be early steps the Assembly is taking toward limiting Airbnbs and similar rentals.

Assembly member Wade Bryson thinks the flurry of new short-term rental listings may be a temporary blip, caused by this weekend’s Ironman Alaska event.

“I think waiting till after Ironman will give us a better understanding of what the community is really going to be like,” he said. “Do people like this? Is it going to be a true problem that just continues to grow? Or do people really be like, ‘Oh my God, that wasn’t as great as I thought. It’s not awesome to bring a stranger into your personal home and let them use your stuff for a week.’”

Bryson urged patience.

A weather system passing over Juneau today is causing irregular dumps of rain.

“The airport had over .4 inch in one hour. So that’s really, really heavy for precipitation rates,” said senior forecaster Nicole Ferrin with the National Weather Service.

She said she’s been tracking a low pressure system that has bands within it that cause periods of intermittent, heavy precipitation. She said the Weather Service expected the overall precipitation rates but updated the forecast to reflect the rainfall’s on-and-off nature.

Ferrin said weather-related hazards from this event are unlikely.

“Occasionally, when the ground is saturated and there’s a significant wind shift that happens — slides and things can happen,” Ferrin said. “But usually that’s more with a really heavy event that lasts for a longer duration than what we’re seeing right now.”

Looking ahead, she said to expect a break in the rain on Wednesday and Thursday.

“And then we’ve got really heavy rain coming back on Friday night. And so anyone with plans Friday night might need to move things indoors,” she said.

The opening ceremony for the Ironman Alaska is scheduled for Friday night, outdoors at Peratrovich Plaza.

Ahead of this week’s storms, Juneau Docks and Harbors asked all boat owners to make sure their vessels are secure and are not accumulating rainwater.