SKYE CALCULATES A CAREER
Moench considers
herself an athletic late bloomer. She learned to love the outdoors on family trips to Canadian national parks, but was never competitive at sports in school. She enjoyed swimming (but perhaps loved five-cent candies more). School ski trips didn’t ignite her competitive fire. A neighbor encouraged her to try running, and she enjoyed it, completing her first marathon while still in high school. But rather than sports, she found she had a talent for math. And working with numbers offered a certainty never guaranteed by her nomadic childhood.
Through high school, she excelled in calculus and finance classes, and began to dream of a career in accounting, of wearing a business suit and a pair of sensible heels to a shiny office. Accounting offered security and a clear path to success: attend her dream school, Brigham Young University (BYU), and work for one of the “big four” accounting firms, Ernst and Young.
As a high-school senior, she recalls writing a paper on triathlon as part of a class, her first discovery of the sport. But she wasn’t inspired to alter her career plans. At least not yet.
Rather, Moench executed her plan, working her way through college to graduate debt-free. An internship with a top accounting firm would lead to a full-time job.
And yet, there was that paper on triathlon. Four years after penning that assignment, while working her way through the BYU accounting program, she borrowed a bicycle, dropped the saddle, and did her first triathlon, the True Cougar Tri. She bought bike shoes the day before the race. She wore cotton shorts. She came fifth overall. And she had fun – the joy experienced by so many at their first race, of leaving it all out there, feeling the wind and soaking up the experience.
By 2010, with a little disposable income from her accounting internship, she bought a bike and a wetsuit, and did a few more local races.
“I don’t know how I knew that triathlon would be my thing,” she says. “I liked swimming and grew up riding a bike, and I liked running. It was just fate. Something was planted inside of me and I just had this gut feeling that I wanted to do it.”
For her first half-distance event, she printed out two months of blank calendars and filled in a training plan for herself. “I was completely naïve, but just happy to be doing it. It’s the joy of beginner triathlon – you don’t know what you’re in for. I just thought I could do it.”