Originally Posted by Bah Humbug

Assuming you mean Ironman, I think a half is $375 and a full is $750. The kicker is then you have (often) the flight, the bike transport, minimum 5-night hotel stay, and so on. You're lucky to get out of the weekend for only $3k, and that's before the price of everything like the wetsuit and the P5X and the Roka Maverick Pro and Nike 4%s and so on. While you can compete (and do fairly well) on much lesser equipment (as I did for years), the gear-obsessive culture creates the impression that you're in for $10k or more to just do your local sprint. Then you see that you can roll out of bed and drive to a 5k/ 10k/ marathon/ CrossFit gym/ whatever, and you don't even have to pretend to learn how to swim.