Sal Farruggia from slowtwitch.com recently got - Up close with Tyler Butterfield.
Butterfield has raced many endurance sports over the past decade and while the events he has raced have varied, one thing has remained the same, his supreme cycling skills. Butterfield raced in the Athens Olympics and then put his triathlon career on hiatus to compete as a professional cyclist in Europe. He then came back to Triathlon to compete in the London Games where he finished 34th and recorded the fastest bike split. Recently Butterfield announced will be competing in 70.3 and Ironman races in 2013, writes Farruggia.
Q. Slowtwitch: Your accent caught me off guard.
Butterfield: Yes I’m quite a mix. I’m from Bermuda and I have lived in Australia for 3 years or so, France for 2 years, Spain for 2 years and my wife is Australian too. Plus my mom is American and we live in Boulder, Colorado now.
Q. Slowtwitch: So coming from Bermuda, a very small island nation, are you kind of a big deal?
Butterfield: I’ve been in the papers since I was a teenager, but that was also because my mom and dad were good at sports too. My mom was a marathon runner and my dad was from the old-school Ironman era and also went to the Olympics for Rowing, so everyone kind of just expected my brother and I to be good athletes. In Bermuda my dad was sometimes called "Ironman" or "Iron Jim." My parents started or foundered the Bermuda Triathlon Association and the Road Running club too. Before them and their peers at that time, running and triathlon were almost non-existent in Bermuda. Once or twice my mom was running and people would stop and ask if she needed a lift.
Q. Slowtwitch: Have you ever biked the entire island?
Butterfield: Bermuda is a thin U shape (the widest point is 3km wide) and to ride the whole U with a few side out-and-backs is about 3.5 hours, so yes, I ride the whole island a lot while I am there if training hard.
Q. Slowtwitch: How much time do you get to spend in Bermuda nowadays?
Butterfield: We usually get back a couple of times a year, although when we were living in Europe it was much less. Now with my daughter Savana almost 2 and living in the US we make much more of an effort to get back. It’s important for Savana to know her extended family, and now my friends I grew up with are starting to have kids too so my girls have a ball whenever we go back. Whenever we take a break it’s usually there. It normally adds up to about 6 weeks a year.
Q. Slowtwitch: How did you meet your wife Nikki?
Butterfield: Nik had just moved from Brisbane to the Gold Coast to train with the Australian National High Performance Director at the time, and I just started to train with the same group and had moved to Australia from Bermuda. We both joined around the same time. Back then we were 19 and 20 years old! We’ve been together ever since.
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