How ‘Being Nice’ Got Visually Impaired Triathlete Rob Sears on the Start Line in Nice

In July 2025, everything looked good for the U.K.’s Rob Sears. A visually impaired triathlete, he and his guide, Ant Munson, had just signed up for their first IRONMAN together. His wife, Loren, was also set to race. It wasn’t for a full year — IRONMAN Hamburg in June 2026 — but they were all keen to work toward an exciting shared goal.

Then he tripped over one of his dogs and fell down a flight of stairs. He got about as hurt as he could from the fall, spending two weeks in intensive care with a cracked pelvis, spinal fractures, a torn shoulder tendon and a brain bleed, just to name a few of his injuries. To everyone but Sears, his future at IRONMAN Hamburg was obvious — his friends and family told him not to force things and to defer the race until at least 2027. To Sears, his fate at the race was also quite clear, but it was not aligned with what everyone else was telling him to do.

“I said, ‘I’m gonna keep the registration, because I need something to get me through the rehab and to get me get me back out there,'” he says now. “And that’s what I did.” A year later, he made it to the start line in Hamburg, and although he faced more speed bumps along the way, they are what led him to another start list, this time for the IRONMAN 70.3 World Championship in Nice, France.

Losing Sight

Sears was born with choroideremia, a genetic eye condition that has caused his vision to progressively fade over the last 45 years. He can still see today, but his vision is only a fraction of what it used to be.

“I have just over five percent of vision left,” he says. He can see things straight on, but nothing off to either side or above or below him. “It’s like looking through little straws.”

As his field of vision diminished, so did his time left competing on his own in triathlon. He got his start in the sport in 2011, when he was 30. A year earlier, he had gone to London to watch his cousin compete in a triathlon, and he had left feeling inspired to do the same.

“It’s hard to be around a triathlon and not get inspired,” he says. Before going to watch his cousin race, he had already come up with the idea to do 30 new things to celebrate his 30th birthday. Do a triathlon was promptly added to that list, and the next year, he did the same race in London.

“It was terrible,” he says. “But I absolutely loved it.”

From that point in 2011, Sears had another six years of racing solo before his vision got too poor and prevented him from swimming, biking and running safely on his own. He says he can remember the race when it became clear to him that his days of racing as an individual had come to an end.

“I did 70.3 Weymouth in 2017,” he says. “It was a great race, but I had a horrible day.”

Sears says he entered that race knowing he was “visually impaired,” but he was still holding onto the hope that it wasn’t too severe just yet. Plus, he had a plan.

“I followed the feet of the people in front of me,” he says. “That was always my method. I would hope they knew where they were going and just follow [them].”

On that particular day, however, the water was “really choppy,” making Sears’s follow-the-feet plan less effective than usual — and turning the swim into a stressful affair. The bike was even worse, with athletes “whizzing past so quickly” and “cutting in front” of Sears far too often for him to feel comfortable.

“You need to be able to react quickly, and I just wasn’t able to,” he says. “I knew at that point that it wasn’t safe for me or for other people.”

Sears says he had a “horrible run on the seafront” in Weymouth that he spent crying the whole way to the line.

“I knew that was going to be my last race,” he says. And for a while, it was his last race. He didn’t want to race with a guide, he didn’t want to ride a tandem bike, so he remained committed to his retirement from triathlon.

Rediscovering Triathlon

Retirement is the end of the road for most people, but it is by no means final — especially in sports. Countless athletes have walked away from their respective sports, only to make a triumphant return years later. Sears did just that, albeit a bit differently than most.

Unlike Serena Williams or Tom Brady, Sears wasn’t returning to the same sport. He would still be swimming, biking and running, but when he got back to triathlon in 2020, he did so with a guide. His swims and runs suddenly saw him tethered to another athlete, his rides were completed on the back seat of a tandem bike.

He says he decided to get back into the sport when the pandemic shut everything down. Out of nowhere, everyone around the world was being told that they could no longer do the things they loved due to lockdowns and social distancing. This made Sears think about what he loved.

“I realized I really missed triathlon,” he says. His passion to race reignited, he found a guide, a friend named Andy, and they trained and raced together for a while. When Andy’s life took a turn with new responsibilities and a growing family, Sears was left to find someone else to be his teammate. That’s when he found Munson.

“We met on Facebook,” Sears says. “I put a post out on [a local triathlon Facebook group] saying that I needed a guide and asking if anyone would be interested.”

Multiple athletes replied, but Sears says Munson was the “frontrunner” from the start.

A great partnership was good enough, but Munson brought a surprise to the table for Sears. He says he had resigned himself to the fact that he would only be able to race shorter events with a guide. Nobody would want to go longer than a sprint tethered to him, he thought — maybe an Olympic-distance race at most. Munson proved Sears wrong on that note.

“Ant had already done IRONMAN events before,” Sears says. “So he was like, ‘Yeah, sure, if you want to do an IRONMAN, you know, I’m up for it.'”

Hiccup in Hamburg, Invite to Nice

Teaming up with Munson is what brought Sears to IRONMAN Hamburg. He had his fall but used the race as a carrot to chase in recovery, and the duo made it to the line (alongside Loren, who continued her training journey with Sears over the course of the year) ready to compete.

Things were going great on race day, but then the pair got a flat. Unbothered, they got off their bike and set about repairing it. Sears got a new tube and was ready to hand it over to Munson, but then an on-course mechanic came by.

“[He] walked past, looked at the wheel and said, ‘Boys, the race is over,'” Sears says, noting that the issue required much more than just a new tube.

While they digested this disappointment, another athlete came up the road behind them, his bike slung over his shoulder.

“He said he had a puncture,” Sears says. “I asked if he could repair it and he said he had no inner tubes.”

Seeing no reason to keep his tube — which was very much useless to him and Munson — Sears handed it over to the stranger.

“He pumped it up, got back on his bike and went off,” he says. A few days later, Munson got a message from the man. He had finished the race, and all thanks to their help.

That seemed to be the end of the story, for a while at least. Sears says it was a sad way to end his and Munson’s first IRONMAN journey together, but the silver lining was that he had helped someone else reach the finish line, along with the fact that he had been able to watch Loren complete her first IRONMAN.

It wasn’t the end, however, as IRONMAN reached out to him. They had heard his story — his visual impairment, his accident a year earlier, his random act of kindness to a stranger on race day in Hamburg — and they offered him a spot on the start line at the 70.3 World Championship in Nice.

“Being nice got me to Nice,” Sears says with a laugh. “That’s what I’ve been telling everyone.”

None of this was ever part of the plan — Nice hadn’t even been on Sears’s radar before IRONMAN came calling — but neither was getting back into triathlon after his retirement. His decision to return to the sport has made for a pretty great story, though. No matter how Sunday shakes out for him and Munson, the race in Nice should be pretty great, too.

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