This Sunday, Sept. 7, more than 1,800 athletes are expected to compete in the 2003 Ironman Wisconsin triathlon, to be held in Madison and surrounding Dane County.
The contestants will be competing for $25,000 in payouts awarded to the top male and female finishers, as well as 80 qualifying spots for the 2003 Ironman World Championship being held in Kona, Hawaii in October.
Among the competitors in Sunday’s event will be a number of UW-Madison students. Three such participants are Wisconsin seniors Nathan Lampi, John Welter and Mike Casper.
Although they have never participated in an Ironman before, according to Lampi, the three friends are looking forward to this weekend and to accomplishing a long-awaited goal.
“We’re not in it to win it, we’re in it to have a good time and accomplish a life goal at the age of 22,” Lampi said. “One of the guys that I’m doing it with … has run the Chicago Marathon the past two years. … We just wanted to do something that was a step up, something different.”
In order to complete the Ironman triathlon, competitors must get through a 2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike ride and 26.2-mile run. To prepare themselves for this weekend’s intense physical test, Lampi, Welter and Casper worked around each other’s busy summer schedules and trained as often as they could.
“All three of us work out year round. We just go out for runs like a lot of kids on campus do to keep in shape,” Lampi said. “[This summer] we’d get together once a week and do something big, like we’d do a big bike ride, or we’d do a big run or swim. We’d just do something every single day … basically whatever we had time for is what we would do.”
One of the benefits to training for the Ironman, according to Lampi, is that regardless of what or how much he eats, he’ll gain little to no weight.
“We’ve just been eating a heck of a lot more, like food that we’ve kept away from for years because we don’t want to put on any weight,” Lampi said. “We’re just like ‘we can eat this now’ because we’re going to burn it off so easily. So, more trips to Dairy Queen and more trips to wherever. And this week, we’re obviously just doing a lot of carbo-loading.”
While the professional competitors and front runners excel in all three legs of the triathlon, according to Ironman North America Communications Director Shane Facteau, many of them are especially skilled at one of the events. Lampi, on the other hand, doesn’t feel that he is particularly better at one portion of the race than another.
“I’ve never done any kind of significant swimming besides playing Marco Polo, or just whatever that random swimming is, until this,” Lampi said. “People are better at different things … I don’t really specialize in anything.
One of the things that initially encouraged Lampi to enter this Sunday’s grueling competition was actually watching the tail end of last year’s Ironman Wisconsin. “I remember going to the library last year at like 10 o’clock at night, and I saw the real good competitors were done by then,” Lampi said. “But then you’d see like 60-, 70-year-old men doing this, and we were just like ‘if they can do it, then we’re pretty confident we can.'”
The tough training and risk aside (two competitors have died in the Ironman Wisconsin Triathlon) there are very few individuals who can’t even fathom getting through a marathon, let alone a 2.4-mile swim and 112-mile bike ride. For Lampi, Welter and Casper, however, the feeling of accomplishment at the end of the race will make it all worth it.
“It’s just been a life goal for us,” Lampi said. “People keep asking us ‘why are you doing this? This is crazy. You paid money to do this?’ It’s just that doing the marathon … it was cool having all those fans there, but the best part is when you cross that line and you think about what you’ve accomplished … that’s what I’m looking forward to the most, just crossing that line and thinking ‘what have we just done.'”
