On the heels of the storms that overtook the city of San Diego, California, earlier in the week and turned the 2024 Tritonman Triathlon into a duathlon, the Grand Canyon University Club Triathlon team fought through the aftermath this past weekend for strong performances at the event. After top-20 performances a year ago in both Saturday's Draft Legal and Sunday's Classic Triathlon races, GCU sophomore Stephen Garr easily bested those marks, finishing 9^th in Saturday's race and topping that with a 7^th-place finish in the classic on Sunday. Garr's teammate, Josh Canode, missed his first top-50 finish in the event by just 15 seconds, crossing the tape in 52^nd; and racing for her first time in the California event, sophomore Shoshanah Stukas nearly put a trio of Lopes in the top 100, finishing 103^rd overall.
 
Out of the more than 500 participants in Sunday's event, only 35 of them finished the race in under an hour, and Garr was part of the troupe leading the way. In fact, Garr was in line for a top-5 overall finish after completing the first running portion (substituting for the eliminated swimming portion) and the bike, but his final kick in the 5K running finale positioned him in 5^th in the Collegiate Male category but 7^th overall with a finishing time of 54 minutes, 49 seconds. That was just two seconds worse than Garr's first race of the weekend in Saturday's Draft Legal race that saw him 9^th overall with a time of 52:23.
 
Mechanical issues in 2023 cost Canode an actual finish in the race, and his determination to avoid the same fate this year paid off in a big way. Like Garr, Canode's bike portion put him just outside of the overall top 30 before his 20-minute clip in the final run placed him just outside of finishing the event in under an hour (1:01:51), finishing 52^nd overall (42^nd among Collegiate Males). Meanwhile, Stukas made the most of her rookie year at the event, using both run portions of the race to finish 11^th among Collegiate Females and 12^th among females overall with a finishing time of 1:05:19.
 
In addition to the eight Lopes' student-athletes, Lopes' Assistant Coach Matt Johnson raced on his own Sunday, placing 79^th overall with a time of 1:04:10.
 
The Lopes' full results from the Tritonman Triathlon are below:

NAME	TIME	DIVISION	AGE GROUP FINISH	OVERALL FINISH
SATURDAY: DRAFT LEGAL
Stephen Garr	0:52:23		6th	9th
SUNDAY: CLASSIC
Stephen Garr	0:54:49	Collegiate Male	5th	7th
Josh Canode	1:01:51	Collegiate Male	42nd	52nd
Matthew Johnson	1:04:10	Collegiate Male	61st	79th
Shoshanah Stukas	1:05:19	Collegiate Female	11th	103rd
Andrea Loos	1:11:09	Collegiate Female	41st	210th
Aidan Perales	1:14:41	Collegiate Male	150th	282nd
Paige Muller	1:18:52	Collegiate Female	94th	331st
Brody Trent	1:19:13	Collegiate Male	162nd	340th
Lindsey Philips	1:19:38	Collegiate Female	100th	345th