Ironman BANN

Photos by Asia Morris. More photos below.

The Long Beach Junior Lifeguard Program hosted their 35th annual Stud Ironman Competition today along the shores of Long Beach.

The course, which extended from 1st Place to 72nd Place, is about four miles in length, where participants are required to run east along the beach while periodically stopping to swim. Those stretches in the water total two miles, with competitors required to navigate out to 15 different buoys along the way, one of which is the Belmont Pier. For the young guards that finished this challenge within two hours, each one received a “STUD IRONMAN” t-shirt.

The competition was completely free and open for the public to participate and root for the Junior Lifeguards. Competitors were greeted at the finish line by the In-N-Out Burger truck selling food after the event.

Junior guards that competed trained for six weeks, learning CPR, safe ways to make rescues and the history of Long Beach.

“These kids and these instructors work really hard for 6 weeks,” Lifeguard Captain Scott Dixon said. “It’s been a great experience and a great tradition for 45 years.”

It all started with a morning program instructor challenging anyone to beat him in a running/swimming race from 1st Place to 72nd Place in 1979. If anyone beat him, he promised to buy the victor a t-shirt. The course was completed in one hour and 59 minutes, and that is where the two-hour challenge came from.

“The difficult tasks we can do right away and the impossible, well, it just takes us a little longer,” Dixon said. “And we get those kids to do that and tackle those goals.”

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