“I Just didn’t think i could do it. I  wasn’t going to make it. I wasn’t going to finish.”

It’s unlike Jenny Leiser ’02, who has completed 40 triathlons of varying distances and finished 30 in the top three overall, to have such doubt on race day, but doubt somehow caught up with her at the 2009 Florida Ironman start line. It was her very first attempt at the toughest challenge her “hobby” has to offer – 140.6 miles of swimming, biking and running – and, when a friend hugged her good luck, she “cried like a baby” for five minutes.

But, honestly, who can blame her? You imagine swimming the Charleston Harbor, pedaling to Columbia (tired yet?) and then running a marathon around the city and try not to cry!

“There’s just so much emotion,” says Leiser. “You get to that start line, and you’re just hoping that everything you’ve been working for for years is all going to be there.”

Fortunately for Leiser, it was. She quickly recovered her composure and had a great race, finishing fourth in her age group and qualifying for the holy grail of triathlons: the 2010 Ironman World Championships in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, where she swam over sea turtles and dolphins faster than anyone else in her age group.

That little dip in the Pacific Ocean was eight years in the making. After graduating from the College, where she studied biology and swam competitively, Leiser needed something to do.

“When you go from collegiate sports to nothing, you have this gaping hole. Going to work just isn’t enough,” says the chemist in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department’s crime lab. And so she filled that hole with pre-dawn, post-work and weekend-long training sessions, a schedule made less daunting by the friends awaiting her at the pool and on the road.

Her fierce dedication to her sport explains why, when talking about it, she seldom mentions the distances or difficulty. Instead, she recalls how the desert’s uninterrupted beauty propelled her while biking out of Las Vegas, or how in Hawaii she savored running through lava fields and down a long hill that appeared to spill into the ocean and, most important, how she did it all with the world’s best athletes.

Although she did worry about when she was going to put on her deodorant in the beginning of her days as a triathlete, these days Leiser exudes a Zen-like, come-what-may approach to racing: “I don’t think about what I have ahead of me. I think about what all I have behind me, and I never look back.”

And, when that doesn’t work, she just reminds herself: “You can do anything for 15 minutes. You can do anything one more time,’” she emphasizes. “Sometimes that’s the difference between making your race and not making it.”

Celebrating little milestones along the way helps, too – as does looking to her fellow elite athletes for inspiration. It’s a practice that helps her reach the finish line while reminding her there are more important things than finishing. Like the time she was riding up a hill “that was not very fun to ride up” and she “wasn’t having a good time,” when along came this “normal bike, normal looking guy, pedaling the exact same hill with one leg. It kind of puts things into perspective,” she remembers, “when you realize how thankful you are just to be there.”

Even if it is at the start line of a very long race.

– Jamie Self ’02

Photos by Mike Ledford