Rebecca Anderbury

Name: Rebecca Anderbury

Favoured Discipline: Pro Triathlete

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Rebecca's Story

Rebecca spent most of her teenage years playing hockey, with a brief stint in triathlon to please a PE teacher who was forming a new club; she left after less than year! It was only when she met her now-husband, Dan, at the end of 2017 that the sport would cross her radar again. Dan had just qualified for his first Ironman World Championship in Kona and, after getting a half marathon entry for Christmas, Rebecca started accompanying him on long training runs. Over the course of 9 months that progressed to swimming and cycling. By July she had joined Oxford Tri and after travelling to support Dan in Kona she left with one goal: to complete an Ironman.

Over the course of the next 3 years Rebecca went from a complete novice of the sport to a top amateur athlete, podiuming at several Ironman events and winning the ITU Long Distance World Championships in 2019. In 2023 she took the leap into the professional field with the aim of becoming a racer, and she hasn’t looked back! 2025 was a breakthrough year for Rebecca, the highlights of which included qualifying for the Ironman World Championships in Kona, taking her first professional win at Ironman 70.3 Poznan, and stepping into the T100 arena as a wildcard for the first time. Rebecca is hoping to build on her 2025 successes in 2026 and finish the Ironman World Championships in Kona.

"Shoot for the moon because even if you miss you’ll land among the stars"

Rebecca Anderbury

Inspiration

Claire Danson. Claire won her age group at Ironman 70.3 Staffordshire in 2019, one of my first races and I remembered her from the awards ceremony. A few months later she was involved in a crash while out cycling that severed her spinal cord, making her a paraplegic. It reminded me to grab life with both hands because change could literally be just around any corner; but more than that, Claire has reminded me what true resilience and determination looks like.

Greatest Challenge

You don’t look like a runner’. ‘Well if you’re not a club runner you won’t be able to do this session’. These were the words that greeted me the first time I had the courage to go along to an informal track session. I was mortified. I wanted to run back to my car and cry. I was in old running shorts, my trainers weren’t the best, and I wasn’t super skinny, and now all of my pre-session concerns about what people would think had become a reality before I’d even started running. I may not have ‘looked like a runner’, but I did stay, and I did complete the session, but I did cry in the car on the way home. It was an experience that is repeated all over the world for women trying to get into sport, not just triathlon. We don’t look like we fit that stereotype, or we aren’t at the top of the sport, and people dismiss us. I want triathlon to be the sport that breaks the mould, where women can come and enjoy themselves without fear of what other people will think, and where just completing an event is celebrated as much as winning it.

Goals for 2026

Qualify for and finish the Ironman World Championships in Kona. Hawaii is a difficult race to takeonand Ihaven’tyet been successful in getting to the finish line (both times have been hugely bad luck and involved tripping over a carpet and a migraine).