To prepare for the extreme performance required at the Ironman competition, Steffen Haak is practicing several times a week in the pool, by bike or on his feet. Because of his work, as a graduate student, he has to fit his training during the week into an extended lunch or after work for about 2-3 hours, on weekends the training sessions are even longer.

A triathlon is a race combining swimming, cycling and running - with no breaks between the various disciplines. A "normal" triathlon at the Olympics consists of 1.5km swimming, 40km cycling and 10km running. The Ironman Triathlon World Championship in Hawaii, however, covers 3.86km swimming, 180km cycling and 42.195km running. This means that the athletes are on the road for more than 8 hours. Each discipline in this race is a challenge in itself. To illustrate: the 180km cycling corresponds to an average daily Tour de France stage and 42.195km of running represents a full marathon!

Steffen Haak was born in 1982 in Friedrichshafen, southern Germany. He began his industrial engineering studies in 2002, at the University of Karlsruhe (TH), where he soon discovered a passion for triathlon. In the triathlon group at the university he gets excellent training opportunities which have supported him to become one of Germany’s top amateur triathletes in his age group. Steffen Haak is currently working at the computer science research center (Forschungszentrum Informatik, FZI) on his dissertation in the field of Information Process Engineering.