Iron Will: English prof enters Ironman

English professor to compete in Ironman Triathlon on Oct. 23

When English Assistant Professor Anne Curzan slips her slim frame into the chair behind her desk in Padelford Hall at 8:30 a.m., she lets out a long sigh of relief. She’s just finished her first workout of the day, a 6- to 8-mile run. For the next eight hours, she’ll lead a graduate seminar, meet with students, do some research and enjoy plenty of sitting. But when 5 p.m. rolls around, Curzan will have a painful decision to make: Will she pull on her bike shorts and head out for a 40-mile ride, or will she opt for a bathing suit and 2-mile swim in the IMA pool?

Anne Curzan, assistant professor of English, shown here at a triathlon in Ohio where she won in her age group, heads to Hawaii next week to compete in the world’s toughest triathlon, the Ironman.

Her weekend plans are even more ambitious. She’ll get up at 6:45 a.m. on Saturday and complete a 100-mile bike ride from Seattle to Mercer Island, around the island multiple times, and then back to Seattle. When she finally drags her sore body into her house at around 1 p.m., she’ll immediately change into running shorts and hit the trail for a 6-mile run. And Sunday? It’s back to Mercer Island, only on foot this time, running across the I-90 bridge and around the island for a total of 17 miles.

This is Anne Curzan’s life right now. Every moment that she’s not working or sleeping, she’s engaged in a grueling training regimen because in just a few short days, she will fly to Hawaii, to prepare for the Ironman Triathlon World Championship on Oct. 23. (It will be televised Nov. 14.) Probably one of the world’s most difficult athletic competitions, it comprises a 2.4-mile swim in the Pacific Ocean, a 112-mile bike ride and a 26.2-mile run. While this might sound like a death sentence to most of us, it is an irresistible challenge to this 30-year-old athlete/academic.

Curzan is one of the 150 “lucky” participants selected by random lottery from a pool of 2,500 who submitted applications. Those 150 will join another 1,350 racers who earned their spots by winning qualifying Ironman competitions held all over the world.

Winning a lottery slot wasn’t the end of it, though. To secure her spot, Curzan had to prove that she could survive the arduous contest by successfully completing a qualifying race. She entered the closest one she could find, a half-Ironman in Santa Rosa, Calif., last July, where she successfully swam 1.2 miles, biked 56 miles and ran 13.1 miles. All in 90-degree heat and in just over five hours. It was a good approximation of what she will face at the race in Kailna-Kona, Hawaii, where the temperature and humidity levels each hover at 90.

It is truly a worldwide event. In Curzan’s age group (30 to 34) alone, there are women from Denmark, Australia, Argentina, Italy and Belgium, just to name a few. The total number of women in the race is 303.

“All the fastest triathletes in the world will be there,” says Curzan, with a look of awe, for she only became a triathlete about four years ago. While pursuing her doctorate in English at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Curzan regularly ran long distances—a habit she had picked up during a two-year stint in Wuhan, China, teaching English. “There was no other way really to get exercise,” explains the lifelong athlete. “There were no pools and I had no bike, except one that had no brakes.” But all that running had begun to take its toll on her knees, so she enrolled in a master swim class at Michigan. Her swim coach was a triathlete and encouraged her to give it a try, even loaning her his bike when she offered the excuse of not owning a bike. By the end of that summer, she had completed three triathlons.

Now, as she faces what will clearly be the toughest physical challenge of her life, she can look back on those four years with pride at having completed three half-Ironman races and 30 to 40 triathlons.

Training for the Ironman has been like no other experience so far. “It’s amazing to think that I will be ending my day by running a marathon,” she says slightly incredulously. “When you train for something like this, you lose total perspective on normality.”

As the day of the big race draws near, Curzan is scaling back her training to give her body time to heal, and she’s trying to stay focused on her main goal: completing the race. “I think the run is going to be the hardest because it’s at night and at the end of a long day,” she says. “At that point, it’s going to be an act of will to finish.” And if all goes well, she hopes to muster the energy and mental wherewithal to run across the finish line.

Watching her make that final sprint will be her parents, her best friend and two of her UW colleagues Malcolm Griffith and Tom Lockwood. Others will be able to keep track of Curzan’s progress via the Ironman Web site at http://www.ironmanlive.com . All participants will wear microchips on their ankles that will trigger sensors placed along the race route to transmit information about each person’s progress. Curzan is a little squeamish about having this information publicized. “It would be pretty embarrassing if people logged on and found out I’d passed out on the side of the road somewhere,” she says with a laugh. Still, exhaustion and dehydration are life-threatening factors that she’s taking seriously. “I will have to eat as much as I can while I’m on the bike because that’s when my stomach will be the most stable,” she explains. “After all, I’m going to be out there for 12 to 13 hours.”

There are also a few rules she’ll need to keep in mind: Everybody has to finish the race in under 17 hours, and according to official Ironman rules, during the run, “no form of locomotion other than running, walking or crawling is allowed.”

Curzan anticipates that this will probably be her first and last Ironman. “I’m happy to have made the sacrifice because it’s something I’ve always wanted to do and it will be hard to lose the shape I’m in.” Still, she has a refreshingly healthy and self-deprecating attitude about it all. “My body is conditioned to a point that it never should be, nor should anyone else’s; I’ve trained it to deal with distances that are unnatural,” she says. “I’m looking forward to having a normal life again and having the energy to do other things besides just training and working.” ¶

Elise Perachio Daniel