In a town where endurance sport is seemingly everywhere, there's one event that year in, year out, feels a wee bit different.
It's friendly. It's homey. It's like an old buddy who flies in once a year.
And so many recognizable faces. The volunteers. The competitors. And at the center of it all, Steve King, the extreme distance runner turned announcer who connects everything together and somehow makes every single competitor feel, for a moment, famous.
It's the race where everybody knows your name.
It's the Peach Classic Triathlon, and early Sunday morning under idyllic conditions, the 38th iteration of it finally, after a pandemic break that ate up the 2020 and 2021 editions, kicked off at Penticton's Rotary Park.
It was, as always, marvelous.
There are, however, clouds on the horizon. We'll have to wait to see if those clouds clear, but for now one thing seems certain: The Peach Classic will return for 2023 and beyond only if current ownership finds a new party to take the reins.
More on that surprising revelation after we recount a great Sunday where a 40-year-old triathlon coach from Kelowna stole the show, at least in the Olympic-distance main event.
Cory Krist, in only his second Peach Classic ever, barged his way to victory in a time of 1:56:51, a whopping four and a half minutes ahead of his closest rival, Martin Caron of Penticton.
That’s a pretty big gap, and it was obvious early in the bike leg that Krist's dominance had begun to take hold. PentictonNow saw him twice on his journey, and both times he looked fresh and ridiculously fast.
"It's been a good lead-up this year," he said afterwards. "Training has gone really well. We just had a perfect day. The swim calmed down just before we started, and that was a nice surprise."
Krist, who runs the Kelowna Triathlon Club and has been racing for a couple decades, was humble in victory.
"Martin (runner-up Caron) has been recovering from an injury the past couple months," he said, "I usually get him on the swim, but he rides really strong, and I rode scared the whole time trying to hold the lead.
"But when I hit the (bike) turnaround I saw I had four to four and a half minutes on him, which made me feel good. It was a nice surprise."
Krist called the Peach Classic course, which includes stints in Okanagan Lake from approximately the Peach to the SS Sicamous, a bike leg along Naramata Road to Painted Rock, and a run along the first few kilometers of the KVR Trail, one of his "favourites."
"You don’t get any more beautiful than this," he said. "But it's a hard course. The bike's hilly, the run is hilly. You just can’t breeze through it."
Second-place finisher Caron, 45, who in turn had a sizable 2:41 bulge over Kelowna's Matthew Long in third, couldn't regain time lost in the swim.
"Cory had a killer swim and I could never bridge that," he said. "I tried to catch him on the bike and it didn’t happen and then I tried on the run. I think I was coming back slowly. But it wasn’t enough."
Caron didn't use the injury excuse. But he admitted he was feeling exhausted.
"I just came back from a half Ironman in Oregon," he said. "Today I was trying to go back to back, and it did hurt a bit.
Like Krist, Caron had high praise for the event.
"It's my second time," he said. "I moved here only four years ago, from Squamish. But it's amazing. We can see all our friends. All the locals are here. It's just a very fun day. Like family."
For 2022, Caron will skip Penticton's long-awaited Ironman Canada in late August in favor of training for the Ironman World Championship in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii. This'll be his fourth time at "Kona."
"It is a big deal," he said. "I've done alright in the past, but it's been kind of a black sheep for me."
Krist, meanwhile, is all about Ironman Canada.
"I hope today is an indication that my fitness is in form," he said. "Now it'll be a complete change in training focus. If I put it together, I'm hoping to be top ten. If things go sideways, well, that happens too."
In all, 143 entrants completed the full triathlon and 75 found the finish line in the half-distance "Sprint" component. And Penticton IGA, as it often does, showed up big-time, donating snacks, water and 400 burgers to athletes and volunteers.
But will it all continue into 2023? We chatted with co-owner Steve Brown Monday morning and found a guy who's justifiably happy with the 2022 iteration but doesn’t pull punches when it comes to the event's future.
"I think it went off really well," he said. "We were really pleased with the turnout. And we got nothing but good feedback from the athletes. And that's what matters.
"However, we (Brown and co-owner Jeff Plant) are stepping away from the event and are in talks with other groups that may be interested in carrying on.
"That's where we're at. We have leads on people or organizations that might be interested, but we haven’t sat down and had any real conversation yet."
Brown confirmed that Sunday's Peach Classic is the last under current ownership.
"Definitely," he said. "We're getting old and it's become too bureaucratic. It's become very costly. And having a bunch of old men walking around in parks at 4 in the morning, hauling equipment around, becomes very wearing."
According to Brown, volunteers, and young volunteers especially, are becoming increasingly difficult to find.
"There are no young people stepping up to take on these roles," he said. "Maybe we're too old to attract young people, so we're trying to find people who are willing to take it on.
"But I can tell you in the brief discussion we've had that those (potential) new operators have the same concerns. It's the same problem that every volunteer organizer in the province has these days. Trying to attract volunteers and a younger group of people to put these events on is becoming harder and harder."
Brown went beyond volunteers.
"We can’t even get people to show up for $20 an hour," he said. "That's why were there at 4 in the morning. The people we want to pay $20 an hour don’t show up."
For more info on the Peach Classic Triathlon, head to its website here.
