You have to be a little bit of a masochist to compete in an Ironman. Triathlons alone are difficult between the swim, the bike and the run, but Ironman competitions couple those disciplines with distances that would bring most mortal athletes to their knees – a 2.4 mile swim followed immediately by a 112-mile bike ride and then a 26.2-mile run to cap it all off.
Luckily, Westhampton’s Heather Paul isn’t your average athlete. The 47-year-old is training for her sixth Ironman; she’ll travel to Lake Placid, N.Y. to compete on Sunday in front of family and friends.
Paul didn’t expect to still be competing in Ironman races – the competition itself is grueling, as are the hundreds of hours of training for the ultimate test of endurance. But after her first race in 2015, she was hooked and kept coming back for more.
“I’d never done a triathlon before the Ironman, so I was completely new… people were telling me I’m crazy. They said ‘Heather, don’t you think you should do a smaller, shorter triathlon before you do the Ironman?’ I said, ‘No, why bother?’” Paul explained. “After I finished that first one (in) Mont-Tremblant, I said never again. And then the next year – there’s this bug that gets you just chomping at the bit.”
After her Ironman debut at Mont-Tremblant, Paul competed in another half-Ironman the following year and had a good time competing in the shorter distance. But just a week later, an unexpected accident would sideline her for over a month.
“I was out riding my bike… just a training ride, and I actually got hit by a car… it was really bad and I had to be in a knee stabilizer for a month. I was out of commission for a while, and so it allowed me a chance to just kind of think about things,” Paul said.
Paul is someone who is always moving – her day job is working as a personal trainer in addition to training for cycling races and, more recently, Ironman competitions. Getting hit by a car brought that to an abrupt halt, and she said that she was “somewhat depressed” after the accident, because she wasn’t able to work or teach or train like normal.
During her recovery process, she discovered a sign that offered her a new goal. Her bike accident happened on July 23, 2016, and she discovered that there would be an Ironman competition in Lake Placid on the one-year anniversary of her injury.
“At that point, I had only done one Ironman and I always dreamed of doing the Lake Placid Ironman because it’s like the creme de la creme of Ironmen,” Paul said. “When I found out the date for the Lake Placid Ironman was exactly a year from the date I got hit by the car, I said, ‘You know what? I need to do this.’”
A year later, Paul was at the starting line, and crossed the finish line in tears exactly a year after the accident. The incident also gave her the motivation to commit to a long-term goal – now she wants to complete 10 Ironman races by the time she turns 50. Because of the pandemic, she’ll have to finish two Ironman races apiece in two years to still meet that quota, but Paul has always been a “go big or go home” kind of person.
“When I do something, I’ve always done something big. I don’t want to do something small, I want to do something that is really a goal,” Paul said. “I’ve always been one to set a goal for myself and challenge myself and try to meet that goal to make it more satisfying.”
You have to go big when it comes to training for a race of this extent. A self-described “biker at heart,” Paul had to get acclimated to the other two disciplines of the race when she first started competing. She would Youtube swimming videos to make sure her form was the best it could be. Even now, swimming is her least favorite part of the race – there’s a lot that can go wrong in open water, and because the swim is the first leg of the race, everyone is bunched together at the start, swimming around and over everybody in the opening frenzy.
Her training week is jam packed – on Sundays, she hops on her bike and rides a 52-mile loop regularly, and gets up before 4:30 a.m. during the week to squeeze in a bike, run or swim before she has to go home and send her kids off to school before starting her work job.
She tries to bike and run back-to-back to simulate racing conditions; running when her legs are heavy is a better use of her training time. She’ll try to do three or four 100 mile “century rides” before each race, and her running ceiling is usually 15 miles during preparation time. Most of her bike routes are hilly – Paul feels strongest when she’s powering up a hill.
For a lot of Ironman competitors, the crown jewel is the Ironman World Championships held annually in Kona, Hawaii. It’s incredibly difficult to qualify – an average of over 80,000 athletes compete in Ironman sanctioned events each year, and only about 2,000 of them end up traveling to Kona to compete. Paul hopes to be one of them one day. She’s got the skill level on the bike; in last year’s Lake Placid Ironman, Paul finished sixth in the bike portion of the race. But she’s not quite at the level she needs to be in the other two portions.
But there’s another way that Paul could qualify – sheer persistence, and a little bit of good luck. Competitors who have completed 12 Ironman races are eligible to earn a slot at Kona as part of the Ironman Legacy Program.
Paul is already planning on finishing 10 Ironman races. What’s two more for a chance to compete in her dream race?
But that goal is further down the road. For now, Paul is just looking ahead to her sixth Ironman this Sunday and seeing all of her hard work pay off. It’s a long, hard, winding road, but the payoff is always worth it.
“I’m just happy to finish. I always cry when I finish,” Paul said. “Doing an Ironman is extremely emotional because it’s not just even about the actual race day and the race itself. It’s about everything leading up to the race – all the time and commitment and energy and the training that you put into it takes a lot out of your day, your week. I have a wonderful family who supports me and loves me and helps me out and they know that this is important to me. It’s an emotional experience just to train and to be able to do it.”