The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Killingworth, Old Saybrook Ironwomen compete in Hawaii
There seemed to be no way through.
A little more than three months ago, Meg Pennington and Kerry Cancroft found themselves riding into a stiff headwind. Hail rained down. Crosswinds were blowing their bikes around the road. Heavy rain pounded.
The two Shoreline residents were navigating these conditions on whippet-thin tires. On top of an Adirondack mountain in the Alpine village of Lake Placid. In 42-degree weather. And there were still roughly 100 miles to go. And then a marathon to run. They’d already completed a 2.4-mile swim.
That Old Saybrook’s Pennington and Cancroft, a resident of Killingworth, competed in the Ironman World Championship in Kona, Hawaii in mid-October — arguably the world’s most physically demanding single-day sporting event — is only part of the story here.
The real story is how these two working mothers — Pennington, a youth triathlon coach and Level 1 USAT certified coach, and Cancroft, an elementary school teacher in the Branford school system — were among the 4 percent of elite endurance athletes worldwide to win a coveted spot at Kona, as the race is known.
It begins with the odd calm that descended on Pennington as she mounted her bike.
“I actually thought to myself, this is going to be OK,” she said at Stony Creek’s CT Cycle Center, a facility for athletes seeking year-round cycling and fitness training. “Kerry and I had trained in this. We’d done so many long rides, 100-mile rides, in rain, in heat, in every element.”
That willingness to subject themselves to tough conditions, and thrive in them, is why their coach, the Cycle Center’s Ed Vescovi, refers to the two as “mudders.”
“That goes back to rides in early April,” he said. “It was biting cold, and they got out there and they loved it,” he said. “They just like the sloppy track.”
It didn’t start in early April. For months, there were hundreds of laps at the YMCA pool and in open water off Cornfield Point in Old Saybrook, the Madison Surf Club, and at Hammonasset. There were 12- and 15-mile runs while wearing a heart-rate monitor as part of the heart-rate-based training they followed, a way of disciplining the body to maintain a certain rhythm and pace.
They did the same on CompuTrainers, an indoor bike trainer that simulates real-world conditions with a large projection screen showing actual videotaped courses around the world. For their 5 a.m. workout at the Cycle Center, they got up at 3:30 in the morning.
Pennington is home before her three kids go off to school. Even with her husband and friends picking up the slack, it’s the weekends, when she and Cancroft spend up to five hours on their bikes, that are the greatest challenge, she said.
Cancroft agreed. “As a mom, you have that guilt whenever you miss a game or a meet,” she said. “You’re just going to have those moments. But then I hope the lesson my daughters take away from it is that their mom really wanted to accomplish something and worked really hard to get it and she did it, rather than ‘my mom missed my crosscountry meet.’”
Pennington recalled a drive she took that morning to her daughter’s soccer game in Moodus. “As I’m driving — this is my favorite part — I’ll say, ‘kids I biked this,’ and they’re like ‘from the house?’ and I’ll say ‘from the house,’” she said. “There’s something cool about that.”
No more so, both said, than when they see their kids cheering them on from the sidelines while they’re in the thick of competition. Their families, too.
In Lake Placid, 25 members of Cancroft’s family, including her five siblings and their spouses and kids, rented a house and came out to show their support. That’s counting her mother, Pat Cahill, who guaranteed her daughter that if she qualified for Kona, she would foot the bill for her entire family to travel there.
“When I crossed the finish line, my mom was a couple feet away, and I went to hug her, and all she said was ‘I’m going to be broke,’ ” Cancroft said, laughing.
If winning a coveted space to race alongside the world’s best has left both women gobsmacked — “I teach my students to set a goal and be committed to it and I live that, but I’d never put myself in the category of elite endurance athlete,” Cancroft said — it’s no surprise to their coach.
“These women are not only highly respected in the sport and what they do outside the sport, but they’re also similar in how singleminded and focused they are,” Vescovi said, recalling, a month before Lake Placid, their ride with a group of accomplished male cyclists. “Guys don’t like to be beat, and Meg and Kerry were giving them a run.”
For Pennington, the bond forged with Cancroft goes beyond the training. “It’s rare to find someone who’s close to your ability and who’s just as driven and competitive, and who you also really enjoy being with,” she said.
In the end, it seems, this is as much a story about friendship as it is about competition and achievement.
“At the start line at Lake Placid, we knew we’d done all the training and we were ready,” Cancroft said. “But it’s still such a long day and things might not go well. To get to that start line and look back and realize whatever happens, look at everything we did, all those rides, those runs, those swims. This is just one day, but look at everything leading up to this one day. You just feel that you’ve done it already. You feel like you’ve already won.”
Not to mention, as Pennington added, “to be able to go through it with someone, to get through it with someone, is just awesome.”