Yes Yes Yes: Ironman World Champion is done playing it safe

Yes, Yes, Yes: The Ironman World Champion is done playing it safe

Chelsea Sodaro teams up with SunGod on a Signature Series that's as bold, joyful, and unapologetically alive as the woman wearing it.

There's a moment in every Ironman when the body starts negotiating. The legs file a complaint. The lungs submit a counteroffer. And the mind, the one thing left standing, either folds or finds something to hold onto.

For Chelsea Sodaro, that something came from the most unexpected place: a toddler's shoes.

"Yes yes yes comes from my daughter, she was at an age when most kids say no to everything, and my daughter just went the other direction. She said yes yes yes, and it got stuck in my head."

That Ironman was Kona 2022. The one where she crossed the line first, on debut, in one of the most amazing performances in the race's modern history. And with every pedal, every stride, what kept repeating wasn't a training cue or a race strategy. It was a two-year-old's enthusiasm for the world. Yes Yes Yes.

Now, that mantra has a home on her sunglasses.

The Forty2 in Hot Pink

SunGod's Signature Series exists for exactly this kind of collaboration, the kind that starts not with a colour swatch or a brief, but with a story. For Sodaro's edition, the result is the FORTY2s in hot pink, the words YES YES YES etched on the lens.

"Triathlon can take itself very seriously," Sodaro says, and she's right. It's a sport that often defaults to neutrals, to data, to the language of suffering-as-sacrifice. The FORTY2s in hot pink is a deliberate counterpoint, a splash of colour in a discipline that forgets, sometimes, that joy is also a competitive advantage.

The FORTY2s is built with SunGod's industry-leading lens technology 8KO®: optically pure, distortion-free, designed for the kind of sustained focus that a 140.6-mile race demands across open water, asphalt, and the long road home. The frame sits light on the face, locked in through the toughest conditions, because when you're eight hours deep into a race, you don't want to be thinking about your eyewear.

But here's the difference with Sodaro's: They are built for anywhere, chill cycle in the park, 5km run and coffee or an 8-hour gruelling Ironman. That's the point.

The Identity She Had to Build

Before the pink lenses and the world title, before the mantra, there was a version of Chelsea Sodaro who wasn't sure she belonged.

"It took me a while to really embrace my identity as a triathlete. The sport carries a certain image, a specific build, a specific background, a specific kind of intensity, and I didn't always recognise myself in it. Now I'm just totally obsessed. Finding what I'm capable of through three sports is... It's something else."

That curiosity, the not-yet-knowing, is central to how she talks about everything. Her mentality, she says, has always been about finding what's possible. "I'm still super curious about what I can do. I don't feel like I've hit any kind of limit."

This is the thing about Sodaro that makes her compelling beyond her results: she talks about sport the way people talk about art. Triathlon, for her, is an expression, a medium through which she tests the edges of endurance, perseverance, and the relationship between mind and body. "It's such a beautiful metaphor for life, It's about finding out what's possible for your mind, your body, your spirit."

What Yes Yes Yes Actually Means

The mantra doesn't mean positivity in the motivational-poster sense. It means commitment, the decision to lean in when every signal is telling you to back off.

"Yes, yes, yes is all about leaning into the hard moments, so often in life and in racing, we back down when things get painful or difficult. Yes, yes, yes is about asking yourself: am I going to do this? Are you going to lean into the discomfort and go all in?"

It's a philosophy that sits uncomfortably close to something real. Most people, most athletes, have a moment where the answer is no. Where the cost of continuing outweighs the reward of seeing it through. Sodaro proposes that the mantra short-circuits that calculation. That by the time you're saying yes, yes, yes, you've already decided.

But every day, she is still figuring it out. Her personal life, her career, the many directions that pull at her attention, a lot is going on. The intention is to deposit everything into whatever she's doing in a given moment. "Giving my all to whatever is in front of me at that time, that's the whole thing."

A Note on Adventure

For anyone looking at the FORTY2s and thinking the sport might be for them, Sodaro has some advice:

"Find a training group. Find a mentor. Get a coach. This is not a solo journey. It's supposed to be fun. It's supposed to be joyful. It's supposed to be an adventure. It's not something to take on alone."