Last summer we ran wetsuit trade in deals all around the world. The idea was to take in your old, tired wetsuit and give you a discount on a shiny new one. In the UK alone, we collected over 100 wetsuits, but rather than packing them off to wetsuit retirement homes, we recycled them.
All of the traded in suits were washed and inspected. A few didn’t make it past this point, they were simply too worn out to be used again. Many were repaired, neatly packaged in boxes and shipped off to event organising partners that we work with.
In the UK there’s a brilliant new scheme called GO TRI, which is designed to encourage new triathletes to have a go at the sport. The events are low cost and back to the old days of the sport when field sizes were small, carbon fibre and disc wheels were scarce and chip timing didn’t exist.
Most GO TRI events are in swimming pools, but our partners, One Step Beyond, organise one of the only open water events in the country, and the first one took place in Nottingham last week. We sent along our recycled suits, and it was pretty cool to see old Ironman wetsuits and the Stealth back out there doing triathlons again.
Developed in 1998 using clinical studies into improving VO2 performance, the Stealth was a game changer. It was replaced in 2005 by the multi award winning Helix. Just like the Helix, it had blue TST panels on the back, which aid flexibility, body roll and general swimming performance.
Ironman wetsuits was blueseventy’s name prior to 2005, so these two suits at the event in Nottingham had a lot of experience before getting into the GO TRI swim last week! No surprise that the Stealth was first out of the water!
