The Beginning

As part of Evotri, we were all asked to write how we got into this sport. It's a great look back to where we've each come from and to hopefully encourage any potential team members that we've all started somewhere, even JP, who recently WON an iron distance triathlon, and Rural Girl, who recently crushed her 3:30 marathon goal. My story starts with a boy...

I had been dating Steve for 2 years by the time we went off to college. We were high school sweethearts but had decided to go to seperate colleges. He was going to a small art school, and I was at a different university. As luck would have it, those schools were just under 4 miles apart. I had run cross country and track my last 2 years of high school and had loved it. Though I was definitely a middle-of-the-road runner, I loved that the more work I put into it, the more I would get out of it. They were sports where "favortism" didn't really come into play. The numbers spoke for themselves. If you could post them, you were on the roster. I loved the objectivity of it. I still ran when I went off to college, but I had decided that science majors and college sports didn't mix. I really missed the team enviornment, but I kept running for fun. On Fridays, Steve worked in the art gallery at his school. I used these days as my long run days. I would run the 4 miles down to see him and the 4 miles back. One day, I added a couple of miles. The next week, I added one more. The day I ran 16 miles, I decided I would sign up for my first marathon.

By the summer of 2003, I had run 3 and was training for my 4th marathon. I was sitting in my house and just happened to turn on the TV one Sunday. They were airing the Lifetime Fitness Triathlon on TV, and I couldn’t take my eyes off of it. Though I had been running, I hadn’t given triathlons much thought. After watching the program, I vowed that I would be there in 2004 to race the Olympic distance race. I signed up a couple of months later and started training. It wasn’t exactly easy. I had never met anyone who had done a triathlon, so I basically learned all I could from books (I had quite the library of tri books by then). Wouldn’t you know…after all that training, my timing chip fell off my ankle during the swim. I managed to screw up my watch’s lap function during T1, so I don’t really have any idea what any of my splits were. I also lost all of my nutrition during the bike, which resulted in me almost losing my cookies at the end of the race. During that first tri, I thought about Ironman. Oddly enough, it was the M dot tatoo on a woman's right thigh that planted that seed. I saw it when I was on the run, and I thought to myself, I could do that someday. After that first race, I was hooked. I knew that more races were in my future, and in 2006, I realized my Ironman dream for the first time. The rest, as they say, is history!