KAILUA-KONA — Not even during the final few steps, with the finish line glowing and the evening crowd in a frenzy, did Jennifer Tait think she would finish.
It was too much to comprehend, so she didn’t bother to try. It was just one step, then another. Push, push, push, she’d told herself over and over again. If it works, it works, and if it doesn’t, it doesn’t.
“It’s almost like, try less,” the Oxford, England, woman said. “Try less hard and just trust and somehow it comes together.”
Somewhere on the 26.2-mile run she’d felt her foot erupt. The whole sole of one of her feet had turned into a blister, then exploded. It was on the run, too, when supporters had started following her and told her to look at the last leg of the grueling course in sections: Walk five lamp posts, run two. Get to the next lamp post, then the other. Post by post, step by step, push, push, push.
So when Tait, racing in the female 55-59 division, turned onto Alii Drive to tackle the final stretch, the crowd wild with excitement, music blaring, lights shining, it didn’t dawn on her.
“I can’t stop now, can I?” she thought. “They’ll all laugh.”
Then, just like that, in a flash, it was over and she looked down and saw her blistered and bandaged feet standing at the red finish line.
“I believed it when I was on the carpet and I saw the time,” she said of her 16-hour, 57-minute and 52-second unofficial mark, beating the 17-hour cutoff by 2 minutes. “I didn’t believe it until it happened. Because I could so easily stop. I’m so lazy. I could just so easily stop. I’m terrible. I kind of kept not believing it. It was just too good to be true.”
The dramatic finish capped an equally so journey, one that Tait set out on because she had unfinished business to sew up. Last year, after qualifying for Kona through the lottery system, she was pulled off the course during the final leg of the 112-mile bike ride. She’d felt good that day, was moving well along the course, and felt the cutoff wasn’t just. She’d vowed immediately after to finish this year, and that’s when the work really began.
Back home in England, she found a charity, Macmillan Cancer Support in London, that had a spot in the race. Her eldest son had died around seven years ago, and she still battles depression because of the loss.
“I had a very blue winter,” she said.
Partnering with the charity, she pledged to raise money for a shot at redemption. She quit her job. She networked with friends and gym members to donate to cancer support.
“So we got no money,” she said. “Every penny goes to the charity.”
So far, they’ve raised £14,000, according to a website tracking the cause.
“It’s been hard,” Tait added.
When she trained, the depression would come in waves and knock her off. She’d go a week, sometimes two, unable to swim, bike or run. There were stretches where Kona seemed more than a world away. But she’d get back on track. She’d work through the depression, and try not to understand it all. Try less, as she puts it.
“I know it sounds silly, but there’s something about Ironman, about enduring,” she said in the wee hours Sunday morning after she had been checked out by the medical staff, wearing her finisher’s medal around her neck, about how she persevered. “For me, I was actually getting quite emotional this morning because there is something about spending 17 hours outside of your body, it’s the closest I’ll feel to my son. Where there’s nothing else to do but push, push, push.”
In the water, the swells had been bigger than she expected, though she climbed out of the water in 1:44:59. On the bike, she passed the time cutoffs, but something on her bike was askew and rubbed against her calf. But there was no time to stop and inspect it so she gutted it out until the run where the supporters taught her to look at each lamp post, one by one.
“There was a nice little crew out there, making sure I didn’t slack off,” she said. “So it was a team effort.”
And then came the step where her foot exploded.
“I hobbled the last 12K,” she said.
So it was like that when she turned on Alii Drive, the nighttime crowd cheering and delirious, that she just kept knocking each step off, one by one, as the clock clicked closer to cutoff.
“Stressful,” her husband Matthew described watching it.
Until, finally, in a flash, it was over and there was nothing else to do but smile.
“When it’s hard, just give it up to the universe. No?” Tait said. “Don’t try to understand it.”