Choice of Champions: How Clermont Became the Place Olympians Come to Suffer
A USA Triathlon-certified training center, a 312-foot 'mountain' and a lakefront built for dawn workouts: the machinery behind Clermont's endurance economy — and how visiting amateurs plug into it.
3 minute read
Clermont’s city motto is “Choice of Champions,” and unlike most municipal slogans, this one can be checked at dawn. Head down to Lake Minneola at first light and the waterfront fills with wetsuits and carbon wheels; drive the ridge roads mid-morning and you will share them with training groups from three continents. A town of hills in a flat state became, deliberately, one of America’s endurance capitals. Here is the machinery behind it — and how a visiting amateur plugs into it. The town overview is on our Clermont hub.
The anchor: the National Training Center
The Orlando Health National Training Center, on Don Wickham Drive, opened in 2001 under South Lake Hospital and now operates as part of Orlando Health South Lake. Its résumé is specific: a 37,000-square-foot fitness facility, a 400-meter track and field complex, athletic fields, a cross-country course, and an aquatic center built around a 70-meter by 25-yard outdoor pool with eight long-course lanes. USA Triathlon certified it as one of its national performance centers — in 2013 it was only the fifth facility in the country to earn the designation — and the center hosts visiting individuals, teams, camps and clinics year-round, with temporary memberships for athletes training without a coach. Olympians and professionals in triathlon, track and field and a half-dozen other sports have based training blocks here; the center’s pitch is simple — warm weather, open water, and hills.
The hills are the point
Everything returns to elevation. The Lake Wales Ridge gives Clermont rolling terrain that cyclists and runners cannot find anywhere else in peninsular Florida, and the emblematic climb sits just north of town — labeled plainly as nearby, in the Ferndale area rather than inside Clermont: Sugarloaf Mountain, 312 feet above sea level, the highest point on the Florida peninsula and, with about 245 feet of prominence, the most prominent point in the entire state. The road over Sugarloaf is a rite of passage; local riders measure themselves against it the way other towns’ riders measure a bridge. Back in town, the paved South Lake Trail and the Clermont/Minneola lakefront miles supply the flat, fast work — we ride the system in our South Lake Trail guide.
The designations stack up in a way few towns can match: a state Trail Town award in 2018, Runner-Friendly and Bicycle-Friendly Community certifications, and a spot at the exact midpoint of the Florida Coast-to-Coast Trail. Clermont did not merely host the endurance economy — it applied for it, credential by credential, and then built the training center, the trails and the race calendar to match the paperwork.
Race day: the Great Clermont Triathlon
The scene has a flagship event. The Great Clermont Triathlon, staged by Sommer Sports at Waterfront Park each spring, bills itself among the longest-running triathlons in Florida — its 2025 edition was the 42nd annual — with sprint and Olympic-distance racing that swims Lake Minneola and bikes the loop around it. Around it clusters a full calendar of runs, rides and open-water events that use the same lakefront the triathletes train on, which we tour in our waterfront guide. The Clermont Triathlon Club keeps the amateur end organized year-round.
Visiting to train: the practical version
Base yourself near the waterfront, where the trail, the lake and downtown’s food are all within a warm-up jog. Swim open water at Waterfront Park in the early hours, ride the ridge in the morning before the heat builds, and book National Training Center time for the pool and track work — visiting-athlete arrangements run through the center directly. Eat like it matters: the downtown rotation in our Clermont dining rundown is built for appetites this town understands. Clermont did not luck into its champions. It built a pool, kept its hills public and let the world come and suffer on them. Visitors are welcome to join the suffering — that, in the end, is the town’s whole hospitality model.
Photo: Lithium6ion, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
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