Taking a world champion title at elite level triathlon is an incredible, career-defining achievement. But winning the title of World Champion across three triathlon disciplines? Now that’s extraordinary. Enter Flora Duffy, freshly crowned two-time ITU World Champion, ITU Cross triathlon World Champion, XTERRA World Champion, and last year the first woman to achieve the trio of world titles in one racing year.

Here, the almost-30-year-old Bermudan, who splits her time between Boulder, Colorado and Stellenboch, South Africa, talks about training, 2018 goals and the challenge of fitting XTERRA triathlon training into an already jam-packed ITU schedule.

Just eight months before she became WORLD CHAMPION by winning her age category in the 2015 Duathlon World Championship, Claire Steels had never dipped her running toe into the run-bike-run world of duathlon. That’s right, she had zero duathlon experience, which is totally bonkers. In fact, she’d only bought a bike a few months previously, and when she did eventually compete for the first time, she hated it!

I love a story like this, so I quizzed 30-year-old Claire (who’s also the current ITU Duathlon World Champ in her age group) about training, her journey to world champion, and how she grew to love duathlon.