Hot Day in Chicago
Lucia Raimi went to Chicago ready to race her first Olympic triathlon with her daughter. Find out how they stuck together and beat the heat and dehydration.
Race for the Ages
Ready to retire, three Baby Boomers from Ohio decided to race their first triathlon together. Follow the friends' journeys toward the finish line.
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Mark your race calendar!
The following 2007-08 races are taking off at a starting line near you:- Dec. 1 - Reindeer Run 5K, Cleveland
- Dec. 31 - New Year's Eve 5K, Stow
- Feb. 2 - Frostbite 4-Miler, Akron
- March 9 - Shamrock 15K and 5K, Cleveland
- April 28 - Hermes 10-Miler, Cleveland
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Features
Rewriting the Rules
Women of the Baby Boom form the next wave of retirees, new face of triathlon
By Gina Prodan
Last Fran Bartholomew checked, 50 was the new 30, which makes 60 the new 40 and retirement the new Club Med. Yet for all that fashion magazines was doing to make older women like Fran look young again (go ahead and wear that miniskirt, honey!), it was her new retirement lifestyle that made Fran feel like a rock star. Especially on one cold September morning:
Standing chest-deep off the shores of Portage Lakes in Akron, Ohio, Fran sinks into the lake’s muddy bottom as she bounces in place waiting for the start. It’s 40 degrees outside the water; almost 70 in it. Pieces of her red-tinted bob poke out the bottom of a blue race-issued swim cap, which most of the women around her wear with nervous smiles accented by crow’s feet. And if the water weren’t so murky you could see numbers between 50 and 66 (their ages) scrawled on each of their right calves. Fran’s says 59.
As she listens to women chatter about frozen bodies, flabby thighs and finishing times, Fran adds minutes in her head and figures that in a little over an hour she will be warm, dry and exhausted.
She’ll also be a triathlete.
Fran Bartholomew, 59, races out of the water at Portage Lakes for her first competition at the Akron Women-Only Triathlon. Check out an audio photo essay of Fran's race day and then create your own story.
Fran retired after 35 years as a high school gym teacher near Canton, Ohio, in May 2007, joining the first wave of Baby Boomers in the next phase of their lives. The final school bell had just rung on her career when she started training for her first triathlon. Like a growing number of retirees, Fran’s life isn’t slowing down.
“Oh, no,” she says. “I’m just hitting my stride.”
While Masters athletic contests and senior Olympic events have grown popular in the United States, athletes over 50 have become regulars on the competitive circuit and even the elite stage. It’s estimated that almost 100,000 senior athletes—a number that has doubled in the past five years—took to the field or toed the starting line in 2006.
Triathlon, which combines swimming, cycling and running into a single event, has seen the number of older female participants grow in the past several years: USA Triathlon (USAT), the sanctioning organization for multi-sport competitions, reports a 54 percent increase in annual memberships for women over 50 between 2004 and 2006 alone. These numbers, however, don’t reflect the women who sign up for single-day memberships, which many first-time triathletes, such as Fran, do.
Born early into the Baby Boom, Fran arrived 20 years too soon to benefit from Title IX—the law that, among other assertions, attempted to level the playing field for male and female athletes. Fran says that her generation wasn’t encouraged to participate in sports the way kids are today. Particularly the girls.
While her childhood offered few outlets, Fran became increasingly active as an adult. She coached several volleyball teams to high school championships and raised three children who led multi-sport lives from elementary school through college. But as authoritative coach and rooting mother, she was always relegated to the sidelines—an activity that never gave her the swim-toned shoulders and cardiovascular health she has developed since May.
Fran knew nothing about triathlons until her friend Susan Bowman, a 54-year-old special education teacher in Canton, handed her a piece of paper that read “Akron Women-Only Triathlon.”
Women only, please
Relatively new to the multi-sport scene, women-only triathlons are geared toward novices or athletes on the fence about competing. These events offer a non-competitive atmosphere with all the trappings of large-scale races, including cheering crowds, goody bags and official regulations. Women-only triathlons are less about beating the next gal than conquering fears and inspiring one another to a glorious finish.
When Celeste Callahan, a 65-year-old triathlete known as “Queen Mother” to her Team CWW (that’s Colorado Wild Women) Triathlon training group, organized one of the first women-only events more than a decade ago, she wanted to give women a chance to be vulnerable and to venture into unfamiliar territory without feeling intimidated or in danger.
It’s difficult to imagine Celeste being intimidated—she’s petite and blonde with a commanding presence that demands a room’s attention, even over the phone. She started competing in multi-sport events in Colorado Springs, over 20 years ago when, she says, a 45-year-old woman was a strange thing to see crossing the finish line. While she didn’t have an active life growing up, she was surrounded by fitness enthusiasts in Colorado and caught the bug. By 2002, she had won the Triathlon World Championships (she was 60) and has remained at the top of her game ever since.
Triathlon, she explains, gives women a steep learning curve to scale with its equipment, technology and multiple disciplines. She says that she didn’t brim with confidence and fortitude at 40 the way she does at 65. Women-only races and training groups can help female athletes develop the skills and female relationships they don’t get anywhere else as adults.
“We give women a challenge and the resources to do it,” she says. “I’ve seen women come to us afraid and leave with a greater sense of how to assert themselves. Plus, we’re often brought up to resent and compete with other women in an unhealthy way. Triathlon helps them connect on a much deeper level.”
The race Celeste organized in Denver, Colorado, was supposed to be a one-time introduction to triathlon, but more and more women came back each year. Then the trend caught on. The Denver race was co-opted a few years later by the Danskin Women’s Triathlon Series, which also started small (around 150 women participated in the inaugural event) in the early 1990s.
Now the Danskin series runs in eight cities—from Los Angeles to Boston—and continues to grow each year. In fact, Danskin welcomed 13,000 women to races across the country in 2000; by 2007 that number had nearly doubled.
Spread the word
While female triathletes between 30 and 49 formed the largest segment of Danskin’s 2007 season, women over 50 made up its fastest growing age category with 50 percent increases over each of the past five years. Organizers have found that the sport has a book club-type tendency for spreading like wildfire among groups of friends. Just like it did with Fran Bartholomew and Susan Bowman.
Susan had learned about the Akron Women-Only Triathlon from Elaine Smith, a 40-year-old parent volunteer at Susan’s school. Elaine had quickly whipped herself into shape, so Susan asked for the woman’s fitness secret.
“She said she’d been riding her bike, running and swimming, and that she was thinking about doing a triathlon,” Susan says. “I thought, if Elaine can do it, I can do it.
“Then I thought, Fran’s my age, maybe she’ll do [the triathlon] with me,” Susan says.
Fran remembers the day triathlons sucked her in: “Sue handed me the paper and said, ‘what do you think?’ and I right away said, ‘yeah, let’s do this… we have to do this.’”
Soon Fran, Susan and Elaine were running around their Canton neighborhoods together and building steam. Other friends, including 39-year-old teacher Sherri Reynolds and Elaine’s 66-year-old mother, Linda Loman, joined the group. And when a serious cycling accident over the summer made Elaine unable to train, she still waved at the women when they ran by her house, brought them refreshments and cheered them through each leg of their race in September.
When Fran talks about training, her controlled gym-teacher bellow pipes up a half octave and her faces wrinkles with glee. She can run several miles now, but she still loses her breath when she tells stories about her first two-miler or her new lifestyle.
“After this race, I don’t want to stop; this [training] isn’t going to stop,” she says. “I like the way I feel right now. I like what this training does for me.”
After she retired, Fran picked up a part-time job as a lifeguard and started a new exercise regimen for the Akron race. Triathlon training, she soon discovered, was like having a second job. But for the first time in her life, Fran had time.
With all three of her children grown and her husband still working full time, Fran finally had time to nurture the one person she had been neglecting for 35 years. Herself.
According to Celeste Callahan, many of the female groups that are helping triathlon grow are made up of older women, like Fran, who have come to the sport through friends and training clubs like her Team CWW. Many of these women have spent their lives living through others and nurturing families, leaving little time for themselves.
Once children grow up or retirement arrives, Celeste believes training helps women make friends, remain active and stay healthy. And by attracting others to their groups, she says, women are introducing their friends and family members to a healthier lifestyle through triathlon.
Of fit chicks and wild women
USAT doesn’t offer official statistics for the number of female athletes who race or train together, but one needs only to attend a single event and see the matching uniforms of the Fit Chicks, Moms in Motion, Wunder Women and Team Estrogen to get the gist. More and more women’s events even offer multi-age categories for teams who want to compete together, including mothers, daughters, sisters, cancer survivors and friends. Events like the Danskin series and other women-only events around the country are becoming the next Race for the Cure—reachable fitness goals with charitable causes.
An event like the Akron Women-Only Triathlon, for example, offers a super-sprint race—a 250-yard swim, 7-mile bike and 2-mile run—that challenges without overwhelming newcomers. And fitness groups like Team in Training help athletes train for these events while raising money for cancer research.
Celeste Callahan explains that the triathlon scene was much different in the 1980s when she started competing. It was 90 percent men and 100 percent hard-bodies. Older women at the races were often assumed to be volunteers or mothers-of-competitors. Never elite athletes.
While triathlon hit booms in the 1980s and 1990s, women were mostly absent from a sport that required the mental prowess, persistence and dedication Celeste compares to being a mother. “You only get better with age,” she says with a wink. And older athletes prove that theory every day.
Still, 1990s triathlon had a big PR problem. It was viewed as a super-athlete sport that was inaccessible to novices with its expensive equipment and unfathomable distances. For years, people associated triathlon solely with the Ironman competition—the 2.5-mile swim, 112-mile bike and 26.2-mile run across Hawaii’s Big Island. It’s a highly competitive race that requires years of training and (seemingly) a few loose screws.
Even while the sport’s biggest event hit primetime television once a year, few people knew triathlons (and triathletes) could come in all shapes and sizes. And genders too. So, Celeste wanted to spark a revolution.
She started small by training with a few friends and convincing one or two more each year to join the group. By 1996, they began calling themselves the Colorado Wild Women, and the name stuck. Team CWW made their way to the University of Colorado (UC) several times each week—whether together, in small packs or one-by-one—and created a quiet stir.
Many people were shocked at the sight of women between the ages of 45 and 80 training hard for such a strange event. But it didn’t phase Yoli Casas, a research assistant at UC’s Center for Physical Activity, Disease Prevention, and Aging, who has coached endurance athletics for over 20 years.
Yoli hails from Costa Rica, which she left in her early twenties to seek an American education and eventually to do research in exercise science. Her studies have focused on older female athletes and how aging affects their bodies and performances. She keeps her hair closely cropped to avoid the mess of ponytails and, at 50, still has the long, sculpted runner’s legs that took her to the Olympic trials in track and through more than one Ironman competition.
She began coaching Celeste in 1994 (leading to Celeste’s world title) and eventually took the trainer’s seat for Team CWW nine years ago. And for the past 16 months she has also been teaching Celeste to be a triathlon coach. They are dually responsible for the team’s continued growth and its success on the competitive circuit.
From January through November, Celeste and Yoli get to the UC pool by 5 a.m. to kick off practice with Team CWW, whose triathlon experiences range from beginner to elite competitor. It was over ten years ago that the team began with two members; today it fields about 50. But the older women on Team CWW aren’t defying nature, Yoli says. They’re rewriting the rules for aging:
“There’s nothing deep seated in our bodies that says we have to degenerate or slow down as we get older,” Yoli explains. “Our hearts don’t have a definite number of beats. That’s what our society tells us, and we’re too ready to accept it.”
While most Americans are familiar with our children’s obesity problems, studying the way older people exercise and age has become a hot topic. As America continues to gray, researchers like Yoli are learning how to keep the next generation of retirees healthy and active.
“Because triathlon uses so many disciplines—from running and cycling to swimming and weight-lifting—to train for the events, athletes (especially female athletes) are building stronger bones and leaner muscle,” she says. “The combination of triathlon training with the proper nutrition makes for a whole new life on the other side of 50.”
Triathlon training, Yoli says, not only makes for a sustainable exercise regimen, but a potentially fun and competitive one as well. She believes that its tendency to excite competitors into luring their friends and family members makes it that much more sticky than other exercise routines or products. Plus it’s a safe activity for athletes of all ages.
Citing recent research findings, Yoli says that muscle strength, when maintained by a healthy lifestyle and regular exercise, doesn’t deteriorate in men or women from the ages of 35 to 45 or 45 to 55. In addition, she says that researchers have found that speed and endurance in female Masters athletes didn’t change between the ages of 45 and 65 when they followed a balanced regimen. And endurance training for swimming, cycling and running has been shown to provide optimal exercise for maintaining bone, muscle and cardiovascular health in male and female athletes over 50.
Yoli only wishes more women would get involved in some fitness routine sooner—even if she says it’s never too late. But she says people often have more excuses for not exercising—giving themselves less time to live.
It’s never too late to feel young
Kathy Massman, who joined Team CWW two years ago, used to think she was too old and out of shape for triathlons. While she had supported her runner daughter through years of cross-country meets and a few multi-sport races, she never imagined herself standing at the starting line—or crossing the finish line—for a triathlon.
“Not even in my wildest dreams,” says Kathy, a 52-year-old Denver native whose layered, gray hair frames an ever-smiling face. “But there I was, finishing the running leg, and I thought, ‘Wow, I’m a triathlete now.’”
Kathy, however, needed a little convincing to get started.
She likes to tell the story about meeting Team CWW: her 30-year-old daughter had trained with the team for a year and invited Kathy to an end-of-season banquet that celebrated the women’s accomplishments throughout the triathlon season. As Kathy spoke to the women around her, she let it slip that she was over 50 and “too old” to be a triathlete.
“Big mistake,” she says. “That was a big mistake. Somehow word got around, and in a matter of minutes I was surrounded by these older women who told me their stories about when they thought they were too old. They were 50, 60, 70 years old. And they weren’t taking no for an answer!”
Kathy says that it was an unbelievable experience (if not a little frightening) to have so many older women training together and feeling so passionate about their sport.
Because the banquet happened at the end of the triathlon season, Kathy initially thought she could nod and smile her way through the event and never see the women again. But their message stuck with her.
“I’ve never been in great shape and have always had excuses for not exercising,” she says. “But in those intervening weeks, I would walk stairs or run to the mailbox and feel winded. Perhaps I wasn’t getting any younger. I knew what my problem was; I also knew the solution.”
Celeste Callahan and Yoli Casas say that the appeal of training groups like Team CWW is their accessibility to women of all ages, abilities and fitness levels. In fact, Celeste gives a hearty laugh whenever she hears a woman claim she’s too old or unfit for triathlon.
She says that the aging triathlon base has “made it OK to be old”—a lesson she hopes will trickle down to the younger female athletes who compete and train with these women everyday.
Team CWW proudly displays the same attitude and finds itself growing and attracting members year after year. And the number of groups just like it has skyrocketed around the United States—thanks to women like Celeste.
But Celeste says she wanted her cause to be more global.
In 1997, she approached the USAT about launching a program to attract more women to the sport. The organization, however, was a little hesitant about altering its tough-guy reputation—many triathletes, after all, enjoyed the looks of awe they received when they mentioned their sport—and lifting its veil of mystery. She pushed on.
Celeste collected several top Masters female triathletes from around the country and put together a proposal for the USAT Women’s Commission. The new commission would aim to educate women about the sport, attract them to local events and make triathlon more accessible to people of all cultures and abilities.
Realizing the effect a boom in female participants could have on the sport (think water aerobics, Jazzercise, Tai-Bo), USAT accepted the proposal and inaugurated the Women’s Commission that year. Today the commission oversees the development of women’s training programs, encourages women-only events and raises money to develop programs for disabled or poor athletes who want to get involved with triathlon.
One of the commission’s accomplishments, Celeste says, was helping the sport spread to women across the country. Since triathlon started in 1970s San Diego, most women who were involved with the sport tended to be professional athletes in the West. Reaching women like Fran Bartholomew, she says, had always been her goal.
“Triathlon wasn’t some secret we were keeping here in the West,” she says. “I found a new life for myself when I started training at 45 years old. And it only got better. I wanted that for everyone.”
A race for the ages
By 7 a.m. on race day, a D.J. at the Akron Women-Only Triathlon has started pumping inspirational rock (cue “Teenage Wasteland” by The Who and “Right Now” by Van Halen) through club-sized speakers as women shuffle through lines where volunteers mark participants with race numbers on their biceps and ages on their calves. The youngest participant at this race is nine; the oldest is 66.
Racers receive swim caps at registration that are color-coded to age. There’s no hiding from yourself in a triathlon. Between calf-markings, bathing suits and the monumental test of physical and mental prowess, humility is the muscle most tested in this event.
After Fran Bartholomew racks her bike and sets up her shoes, helmet and clothes in the transition area, she takes a deep breath and reminds herself to take the race one step at a time. From water to bike. Bike to running. Running to finish. She makes her way to the beach with her friends, eyeing the grassy uphill she’ll run to the transition area, and wonders whether her soft feet will survive the twig-strewn dash.
The first group of participants—yellow-capped women ages 29 and under—are bouncing in chest-deep water ready to start. The air is the coldest it’s been this September. It hurts most outside the lake.
Fran, Susan Bowman and the other women wearing red, teal, white and blue caps wait on the shore for their age-group waves to push off. The race organizer shouts directions into a megaphone, the crowd warms up and everyone—racers and fans alike—starts to cheer for the start.
Fran’s husband, Joe, her son Jon and several friends snap photos as Fran inches toward the water. She likes being the one in the game.
In about an hour Fran will have reached her goal: to cross the finish line in her first triathlon. She will also have turned a page in her life. At 59 she has become a runner, a swimmer, a cyclist. Fran doesn’t need 60 to be the new 40; she’s a triathlete.
She knows that some of her friends and family think she’s nuts. But looking around her on that cold beach at Portage Lakes, Fran knows she has done something right.