Solveig Lovseth smiles after winning Ironman Lake Placid on Sunday. (Enterprise photo — Parker O’Brien)

LAKE PLACID — Two months ago, Norway’s Solveig Lovseth had never competed in a full-distance 140.6-mile Ironman. Now, she’s an Ironman Lake Placid champion.

Lovseth, 26, came from behind Sunday, after trailing at the start of the running portion, to claim her first full-distance Ironman win in a blazing time of 8 hours 43 minutes, 29 seconds. Her time shattered the women’s course record, which was previously set in 2022 by Sarah True, who finished that race in 9:00.22.

The top four women on Sunday were able to record sub-9 hour times as Austria’s Lisa Perterer was second overall in 8:46:50, while Spain’s Marta Sanchez rounded out the podium in 8:53:07 for third. Last year’s Ironman Lake Placid champion Danielle Lewis of Boise, Idaho finished in sixth place at 9:01:05

“It seems today was so good and today a lot of us were under (nine hours),” Lovseth said. “But it’s definitely really cool to take a course record, especially on this race that has been like many years now, so I’m really happy.”

For Lovseth, who debuted in the full 140.6-mile distance at the Hamburg, Germany, Ironman in June, Sunday’s race was a “fight out there.”

“Usually my legs felt pretty good after the race, but now they feel so smashed,” she said. “I never felt like this before. It’s really good to take that tape after fighting for nine hours basically. So, I’m really, really happy about that.”

Lovseth didn’t get off to the best start on Sunday as she left the swim area in just eighth place among the other professional women’s athletes. But with a super hilly bike course, something she hadn’t really competed on this year — most of her half Ironman races and the one other full one she’s done have all been flat bike courses — she wanted to prove to herself that she could still be successful on a course featuring more than 7,000 feet of elevation gain.

“I think there are definitely things to work on in the bike for me still, and on a course like this,” she said.

After completing her first lap of the 112-mile bike ride, rain started to pour down on the riders.

“I was actually a bit scared. I had never ridden with my helmet in the rain before and like the helmet got foggy,” Lovseth said. “It was so hard to see. So in a lot of the downhills, I was sitting with my glasses in my hands because I didn’t know what to do with them. So that was a bit sketchy to move with them and to be able to brake with them in my hand with all the rain. So it was a bit of different elements out there today.”

Despite the challenges, Lovseth turned in the second-fastest bike time among the pro women and was in third place out of the run transition area. However, she still trailed the top women’s competitor by nearly 6 minutes.

While the rain — which was on and off all day — wasn’t ideal for Lovseth during the biking portion, she was OK with it during the run. Especially since she had trained for this type of weather.

“(When) I arrived here on Monday and it was really, really hot on like Tuesday and Wednesday and I hadn’t really done proper heat prep for this, so I was thinking, ‘If the weather today is like this, I might have a problem,'” she said. “But today was perfect, like Nordic conditions.”

Lovseth was able to make up some key time on the run, passing Sanchez and eventually Perterer on the 17th mile of the marathon.

“I realized I just had to go for it on the run if I wanted any chance of winning today,” Lovseth said. “I ran hard from the start and almost held it all the way, but I was really dead on the end. But then I had the lead so then I thought, ‘OK, I feel tough this much, but I just needed to get it done now.'”

Lovseth, as well as the top four women’s and four men’s professional athletes, earned qualifying slots to the Ironman World Championship. The women’s championship race will take place in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii on Oct. 11, and the men’s race will be in Nice, France on Sept. 14.

Lovseth hopes that Sunday’s win will give her some confidence heading toward Kona. She and the men’s winner, Matthew Marquardt, will look to become the first-ever Ironman athletes to win both the World Championship title and Ironman Lake Placid in the same year.