"Off the wall," the starter yelled to swimmers in the pool at Avery Aquatic Center, as the clock approached 7:30 a.m. The 30 top-seeded men and women could jostle for starting positions, but they weren’t allowed to push off from the wall for the 500-meter race.
“3-2-1-Go!” and the first wave of triathletes exploded in a fury of white water, kicking toward a huge orange buoy that floated in one corner of the pool. No tidy lanes and sleek turns for these competitors. Instead, they bashed elbows and swam over one another in all-out pursuit of personal-best times in the first leg of the Stanford Treeathlon on February 27.
Four laps around four buoys completed, the athletes hauled themselves out of the water and checked their watches as they ran toward the transition area. By 7:40 a.m., senior Kristen Bell had strapped on her helmet and was lifting her Trek off a long rack of bicycles. Barefoot and dripping, she pushed “Baby Blue” to the line where cyclists could legally mount their bikes. Bell leapt onto Blue and started spinning, with her feet on top of the shoes that were securely clipped to her pedals. As she neared Campus Drive and gained momentum, Bell finally had enough balance to slip her feet into the shoes, then reach down and close the Velcro tabs. She sized up traffic and shot off on the second leg of the triathlon—a 20-kilometer bike race that went out Page Mill Road, across Arastradero and down Alpine.
“One word that sums it up is ‘perseverance,’” says Stanford triathlon team co-captain and biological sciences graduate student Charlie Anderson. “You keep going even when your body is in pain and you want to stop.” Anderson looked longingly after the cyclists, then turned to his task for the day—sweeping the bike course for accidents and ferrying any injured riders to a first-aid station. (One rider broke his wrist, and several suffered scratches and scrapes.) With 30 of his teammates, plus 110 friends and relatives of participants, Anderson was working to ensure that the first-ever triathlon hosted by Stanford went smoothly. Another 20 teammates competed in the race, which was sanctioned by USA Triathlon.
As Bell rode back into the transition area 50 minutes after she’d left, she was off her best time: “Flat tire on Alpine—drat!” She dismounted on the fly, racked Blue, pulled on a pair of socks, slipped into her running shoes, gave the elastic laces a tweak and was off again—tying her race number around her waist as she pounded out the final leg, a 5-kilometer run.
It was 8:30 a.m. under a gunmetal sky, and spectators dressed for the morning cold in fleece jackets and hats cheered as Bell tore past in her thin tank top and still-damp Spandex shorts. “She won the Witch City Triathlon,” Greg and Marie Bell, in town for Parents’ Weekend, said proudly. “August 10, 2003—her 20th birthday.”
Like many students, Bell came to the triathlon team with experience in other sports—cross-country, track and gymnastics. Now in its fifth year, the tri team is part of the Northern California Triathlon Conference, competing against UC-Berkeley, UC-Davis and Sacramento State in a spring season that culminates with the Collegiate Triathlon Nationals in late April. Coach Eric Bean, MS ’03, puts the triathletes through their paces each week: four morning swims, two afternoons on bikes, one speed run and one long-distance workout. “Bricks,” which involve biking and then running immediately afterward, are not a favorite regimen. “What happens when you get off a bike and try to start running is that every single muscle in your legs has locked up and you’re kind of shuffling along on wooden legs,” says co-captain Matt Quigley, ’06. “So you try to train your body to loosen up faster. It’s still going to hurt, but it won’t surprise you.”
At the Treeathlon, Ryan Bickerstaff, ’04, MS ’04, business school student Austin Ramirez and Quigley combined to win the collegiate men’s team crown with a total time of 2:58:54. When Bell completed her lap around Stanford Stadium, the clock read 1:21:26—good enough for 29th place in the collegiate women’s division, but she estimates she would have finished fourth without the flat tire. She had a remedy for the disappointment, though: a trip with her parents to the Cheesecake Factory for chicken, biscuits and lemon-raspberry cheesecake.
