Ironman and TriDot – It Was Never About Coaches Anyway

You may have heard the news. Ironman and TriDot have broken up, a surprise to some but if you've been around the industry for a while then it should come of no surprise at all.

You might want to read “Lessons From the IRONMAN x TriDot Break‑Up” on Slowtwitch for a detailed breakdown of what happened.

We all know who Ironman is, but if you hadn't heard of TriDot they an AI triathlon coaching platform. Like most if not all the platforms they focust their marketing directly to athletes. But as you'll learn as part of this story, they do have features for coaches to use the platform to coach their own athletes (more about that later).

There are two letters to coaches, one each from each party explaining their perspective. They are interesting reading. The letter from Ironman is straight forward and to be honest makes TriDot seem a little foolish. I don’t know the real story so it could just be because Ironman has more experience in communications with their customers and are less likely to make mistakes. The letter from TriDot is much less straight forward, for me indicating that it's TriDot that is likely on the losing side of this break up. I've attached both letters to the bottom of they post for you to make up your own mind.

What Happened

This week (Early August 2025 for those of you from the future), TriDot abruptly ended its partnership with Ironman and pulled the plug on the existing Ironman U certification program. TriDot claims they own the IP behind Ironman U’s current education content and are now launching their own certification through the newly formed Endurance Sports Coaching Institute. Ironman, for its part, in an email to it's Ironman-U certified coaches said it didn't know that TriDot had made that decision.

The relationship must have gone pretty sour, and the end result was coaches getting contradictory messages from each party leaving coaches in the dark about the reality of what actually happened, and the real future of the education program.

Iron said it will rebuild its coach education offering independently. This in itself seems weird given Ironman's history in protecting and owning it's intellectual property. I suspect this won't be the end of that part of the story.

The Ironman-U program started 10 years ago and has gone through a few different iterations, a number of them requiring coaches to signup to a proprietary coaching platform that was not their preferred way to coach. In this case it was TriDot.

The worst part about this setup was the fact that TriDot directly competes with coaches by selling athletes AI based training plans and coaching. As someone who tries to learn as much about business as I can this would have ben an deal breaker for me, for others with less experience or less leverage it was less cut and dry.

In my opinion this shows a complete lack of respect for coaches from both TriDot and Ironman. I'm not talking about the break-up, I'm talking about the partnership itself for delivering coach education.

Here's why I think they went ahead and did it anyway...

Coaches Were Never the Priority

This isn’t really about coaches. It never was. Neither TriDot nor Ironman have coaches as their primary customer. Not their customer, not their priority.

TriDot uses coaches as an acquisition channel to get more athletes into their system—then turns around and markets AI-only coaching directly to those athletes, undercutting the very coaches that brought them in. To their credit they don't really try to hide this, it's not a secret. All businesses should prioritize their primary customers. I don't blame them, it's a smart and savvy sales approach.

I went through this myself as an athlete. A coach sent me a referral link to signup to TriDot through what turned out to be a referral program (that by the way would require hundreds of referrals to make it worth while for the coach). Within a week TriDot were pitching me their AI coaching plan, attempting to cut out the coach who introduced me completely.

Ironman, meanwhile, makes its money from athletes. Race entries, merch, sponsors—the whole engine runs on athlete dollars. Coaches are just a means to an end: a way to improve athlete satisfaction and performance, which keeps athletes spending. I don't hold this against Ironman at all either, they don't really have a choice, long distance triathlon is primarily a mass participation sport. Amateur athletes have to be their priority, their business depends on it.

When you’re not the real customer, you’re never going to be the priority no matter what the marketing tells you. All you need to do is follow the money, it's all coming from the end user. The amateur age group athlete.

Coach Education Should be Platform Agnostic

One thing that really bugs me about this whole situation is how coach education is being treated like a proprietary feature of a platform. Good coaching education should be platform-agnostic. A coach using any of the coaching platforms, pen and paper, Google Sheets, WhatsApp, or anything else should have access to high-quality education that isn’t tied to a specific system’s sales funnel and technology. When companies build education purely to serve their own ecosystem, it stops being about coaching and starts being about control. That’s not how we grow the profession.

The Real Problem

TriDot’s approach seems especially problematic. Coaches are encouraged to onboard their athletes using TriDot’s platform—but the long-term play appears to be athlete capture. Once that data is flowing in, the AI engine can take over. From there, TriDot markets “optimized” AI-only plans, sometimes even incentivizing athletes to drop their coaches. That’s not partnership, that's using coaches as an aqcuistion

Ironman isn’t innocent either. While they’ve said all the right things about supporting coaches, they’ve also treated coaching as an accessory to the athlete’s journey. Their platform has shifted multiple times in direction and ownership. It’s reactive and ultimately athlete-centric, not coach-centric.

Final Thought

As someone who works in the coach-first tech space, this whole thing just highlights what happens when the business model isn’t aligned with the coach’s interests. Coaches need tools and education that empower them—not platforms that quietly siphon their value. It’s time we stop pretending otherwise. Coaches should be able to choose whatever platform or media they want to use to deliver coaching to their clients but still be able to benefit from educational programs like the Ironman-U program.

Love Letters to Coaches