What was Ironman Arizona?
Ironman Arizona was the Valley’s full-distance triathlon: a 2.4-mile swim in Tempe Town Lake, a 112-mile bike ride and a 26.2-mile run, 140.6 miles with a 17-hour cutoff, staged from Tempe Beach Park every year from 2005 to 2025. The last one was Sunday, November 16, 2025. In a joint release on September 17, 2025, Ironman, the City of Tempe and the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community said it would be the final race in Arizona “for the foreseeable future,” and as of October 2026 nothing has replaced it. There is no Ironman Arizona in 2026.
For twenty years it was one of the largest spectacles on the East Valley calendar, if a quiet one: more than 2,300 athletes in a typical year, 2,523 at the 2013 peak, in the water at dawn under the Mill Avenue Bridge, three loops out the Beeline Highway through the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community toward Fountain Hills, then three loops around the lake on foot while the sun went down behind the buttes. The last finishers came up the chute beside Tempe Beach Park close to midnight to a crowd that had been there since before sunrise.
The reason it ended was the reason Scottsdale drivers already knew. The bike course ran on the Beeline, Arizona 87, and the land along it has filled with construction since 2005. Ironman’s statement blamed “continued growth in the area, coupled with extensive construction and development along portions of the bike course.” The swim and the run had nowhere else to be; without the ride, the race had no course. This guide stays on the site as a record of what it was, and of what a Scottsdale athlete can still do with the ground it ran on each November.
What race day was like
The swim was a single rectangle in the lake, in from the boat-rental dock just west of the Mill Avenue Bridge, pros at 6:40 a.m. and age-groupers from 6:50 in a rolling start. The November water was cold enough that wetsuits were universal, and the crowd stood shoulder to shoulder on the Mill Avenue Bridge for the start.
The bike left transition at Tempe Beach Park, picked up the Beeline north of the Loop 202 and ran out through the Salt River community toward the outskirts of Fountain Hills before turning back, three times, with lanes coned off for the day. It was rated a fast course, a gradual rise out and a quick return, and it is where the records came from: Lionel Sanders’ 7:44:29 in 2016 was then the fastest Ironman finish ever recorded. Spectators who drove down from Scottsdale watched from the shoulder on the reservation stretch, where the pack came through six times.
The run was three loops along the lake, across to the north shore and through the edge of Papago Park, which meant a spectator at Tempe Beach Park saw each athlete six or more times. Rio Salado Parkway and the lakeside streets closed for the day and the city posted bus detours; the trick was to arrive by light rail or park in a garage on Mill Avenue before 6 a.m. and not move the car until the finish.
The finish was the point. Ironman’s 17-hour clock ran from the start, so the chute beside the park stayed loud until almost midnight, and the crowd was thickest for the finishers who had been out there longest.
What to do instead. The venue is intact. The 5-mile lake loop and the Beeline shoulder remain the Valley’s standard flat run and long ride, and Tempe’s other race weekends still fill the same streets: the Rock ‘n’ Roll Arizona marathon in January and Pat’s Run in April. Scottsdale’s own big ride, the Tour de Scottsdale, uses the north end of the same roads.
From an April race to a November fixture
The first Ironman Arizona was April 9, 2005, hosted with the City of Tempe and the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, with 1,682 starters; Faris Al-Sultan and Kate Major won. Three April races followed, and all three taught the same lesson: a marathon in the Valley in mid-April runs into the 90s. In 2008 the race moved to November, but because Ironman athletes enter and train a year ahead, the spring race was held as scheduled and a second one followed that November, the only year with two. From then on it was the third Sunday of November, the weekend before Thanksgiving, and the field grew: 2,399 starters in 2009, 2,523 in 2013, routinely more than 2,300 after that.
The lake nearly took the race away in 2010. Tempe Town Lake was held in place by inflatable rubber dams, and on the night of July 20 one of the four bladders at the west end burst, draining about three-quarters of the lake, roughly a billion gallons, into the dry Salt River bed. The city had already scheduled the bladders’ replacement; Bridgestone, the manufacturer, paid $3 million toward the refill, and the lake reopened on November 1, three weeks before the November 21 race. The water sat a couple of feet low that year, which made the exit ladders a longer climb, and Chrissie Wellington used the day to run 8:36:13, more than 11 minutes under the previous Ironman women’s best. The bladders were later replaced with a steel gate dam, and the lake never missed another race.
The ending
The 2020 race was cancelled for the pandemic, the only gap; 2021 came back as an age-group race with about 2,000 athletes; 2022 brought the professionals back with Joe Skipper and Sarah True winning. In 2024 athletes voted it third in Ironman’s Athlete’s Choice Awards for overall satisfaction and best run, its first course honors, which made the September 17, 2025 announcement land harder. Tempe Mayor Corey Woods promised “a memorable sendoff this November.” More than 1,800 started on November 16, 2025 under clouds that had threatened to cancel the swim for runoff; the rain held off, the bike was windy, Menno Koolhaas won in 7:58:52 and Simone Dailey in 8:37:17, and 55-year-old Dede Griesbauer, who had turned professional the year the race began, raced it once and retired. Nothing official about a successor has followed.
The Scottsdale angle
Scottsdale never hosted the race, but it supplied a large share of the field and almost all of the bike course’s scenery: the Beeline climbs out of the Salt River community with the McDowells on the left and Four Peaks ahead, the same view a Scottsdale cyclist gets on any Saturday ride out the 87. For twenty Novembers the Sunday before Thanksgiving meant that road coned off and a lake full of swimmers twenty minutes from Old Town. What is left is the training ground and the lesson: the development that made the Scottsdale-to-Fountain Hills corridor valuable is what made the race impossible to route. Keep the morning ride; look for the finish line elsewhere.