TARA NORTON

THE FIRST EVER DÓXAWOMAN

THE AMERICAN STATE of Utah hosts an overnight triathlon that covers 285 miles in a non-stop, two-day timeframe. The Dóxa Threelay is billed as an event to share with teams of 12 people, or, like Torontonian Tara Norton, you can do the whole thing yourself. This year she became the first solo woman to conquer this beast of an event.

The Dóxa race has 36 legs that don’t follow the traditional sequence of swim, bike, run. There are back-to-back legs of each discipline and varying combinations of all three disciplines. This challenges a triathlete in new ways, especially with 28 transitions and a course that includes two mountains with elevations well over 9,000 feet.

In previous years, two men successfully completed the solo course and each were dubbed a Dóxaman. The race directors really wanted to crown a Dóxawoman in 2018 and a friend mentioned Norton to the organizers as a possible contender.

Norton is a former professional triathlete with a passion for ultra-distance races. She competed at the Ironman World Championship in Kona six times with a best 12th place finish. In the Ultraman World Championship in 2016, she was the second woman with a time of 27:56:49.

In November 2017, a Dóxa race director reached out to Norton about their August 2018 race. “He asked if I would attempt their solo category and I said yes,” explains Norton. “I was intrigued by the different sequences of the swim, bike and run legs.”

She had covered similar distances over several days with Ultraman races, but Dóxa would be an all-nighter event and the sleep deprivation would turn out to be a big challenge.

Norton and her dynamic crew downloaded the Official 2018 Dóxa Bible and transformed it into an extraordinary