KAILUA-KONA — Coming into race day, Kailua-Kona’s Kristin Old said she had three goals.
Finish the 2016 Ironman World Championship, stay positive and finish in under 12 hours.
The first one was the easy one. Old, 36, has competed in six Ironman competitions, thrice in Kona. She’s also competed in events in Wisconsin, Kentucky and Canada.
The Kealakehe High School teacher’s second and third goals she considered more challenging.
The mental attitude of staying positive during the race can be just as difficult as the swimming, cycling and running itself — which amounts to 140.6 miles by itself.
“You wanna quit so many times because it’s so hard,” Old said.
She last competed in the Kona contest in 2014. Her name was drawn from the lottery allowing her to compete again this year and she crossed the finish line in 11:55:57, leading all the local women who competed in Saturday’s event, good, too, for second overall among local athletes. She finished 1,544th overall and 66th in the women’s 35-39 division.
Her swim time clocked at 1:04:39 with a cycling time of 6:19:03 and a running time of 4:24:25.
Old finished behind Steffen Brocks, also of Kailua-Kona, who finished first among local athletes. He ended the competition with a time of 10:31:22, finishing 777th overall and 102nd in the men’s 45-49 division.
Brocks swam a 1:01:54, biked a 5:33:22 and ran a 3:46:50, but couldn’t be chased down for an interview following the race where 2,300 athletes braved the course.
But after racing, Old sat on the lawn outside the Courtyard King Kamehameha’s Kona Beach Hotel and reflected on the race.
“Oh my God, it was so hard,” she said. “That was what the Big Island was all about: brutal winds, hot.”
She said swells during the swimming event, winds during the cycling event and high temperatures on the run all came together to create a brutal race.
Her strength, she said, was during the cycling leg, when she was able to keep up persistence while she biked her way from Kailua-Kona to Hawi and back.
Oftentimes, she said, competitors will bike too fast at the start of the leg out of excitement. However, she said, it’s important to be able to save energy for the end of the cycling route.
“This is the mental part,” she said, adding that it’s important to balance the mental and physical aspects of racing. Having the physical ability to compete is nothing without the right mindset.
“Everybody put the training in,” she said. “It’s who can mentally tell their body to suck it up.”
Which meant coming up with a mental game plan.
That involves sticking with the race and going through with it, but also recognizing that athletes still need to be competitive.
“You gotta run your own game plan,” she said.
While Ironman athletes come from all over the world — 64 countries and territories — to compete for one day on the Big Island, Old said there’s something special about being able to compete in her hometown.
“I’m probably the most blessed person out here,” she said.
Old said her husband and paddling teammates came out to support her on race day, as did her students from Kealakehe High School, where Old is a teacher.
In fact, she said, seeing her students waving and cheering at a gas station near Kealakehe Parkway was among the most memorable moments of the entire race.
“I got really choked up,” she said. “It’s pretty special they were all cheering for me.”
At the end of the day, after swimming 2.4 miles, cycling another 112 miles and finally running 26.2 more miles, Old crossed the finish line, clocking a time of 11:55:57 seconds, just over four minutes under her 12-hour goal.
Old said she hopes she can inspire her students to learn that “they can do anything if (they) put the work into it.”
That’s not just limited to athletic feats, she said, but is a lesson students can apply to any goal they set their mind toward, such as academics.
That’s also a lesson for adults as well who might believe they could never do what Old and every other Ironman accomplished.
“People always say ‘I could never do that,’ and it’s bogus,” she said.
It takes sacrifice, she said, and hard work, but it’s not impossible.
”If you really, really want something and work really hard, you can do anything,” she said.