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You may not know Elaine Dowden, but you’ve probably seen her.
She’s the one hogging the same lane for two hours straight at the Island Recreation Center pool, the one riding her bike around the Cross Island Parkway loop 13 times in a row. She’s also the super-smiley senior citizen who’s finished 22 mini-triathlons in the past two years.
But none of that is as mad as what she’s training to do now.
At 68, Elaine is prepping her body and mind for the ultimate distance event: the Ironman Triathlon, to be held in Kona, Hawaii, in October. If you’ve never done one, that’s a 2.4-mile open water swim, followed by a 112-mile bike ride, followed by a full 26.2-mile marathon.
Most people might need to catch their breath after simply reading that sentence, but if it sounds like a pipe dream for a woman pushing 70, know this: She’s already an Ironman.
“I would like to see what’s more important: youth or equipment and know-how,” says Elaine, a retired nurse who’s betting on the latter, in part because the first time around her bike was a 41-pound Schwinn clunker and her know-how was more like know-nothing.
“I didn’t even know how to spell ‘triathlon,’ ” she says of her first Ironman in Kona in 1982. But the fact that the Ironman was her very first triathlon makes sense for an athlete whose career has been largely propelled by blind optimism and pluck.
Elaine credits her ex-husband with getting her into running in the late ’70s. “He was always kidding me, saying, ‘I don’t think you could even run a mile if you had to.’ And I was like ‘I bet I could,’ ” she says.
So she strapped on her leather tennis shoes and gave it a try. “I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, this is terrible, I can’t do this.’ And that made me really mad. So I said, ‘I’m going to do this. I’m going to learn how to run a mile.’ ”
One new pair of running sneakers later, she had not only learned how but was itching to prove it. Her first race was a 10K in her hometown near Columbus, Ohio. “I was one of the oldest women in the race, and I was in my 30s,” she says.
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To keep up with Elaine’s Ironman training, visit her blog at lastwaveelaine.blogspot.com
At the time, running had yet to hit its stride as a sport. For women it was even rarer.
“In some races, I would be the only woman who entered,” says Elaine, who ran her first marathon in 5.5 hours, and signed up for several more after that.
As a woman, the budding runner was often a spectacle in the small farm town where she lived. “People would look at me like, ‘What is she doing?’ Or they’d ask, ‘Do you need something?’”
What she needed was a new goal, and she found it while watching a special on the Hawaii Ironman on ABC’s “Wide World of Sports” in February 1982. That was the year that Julie Moss, a college coed, found herself in the women’s lead until the final moments of the grueling competition, when her body literally began to give out on her. With just yards to go she was passed by another woman for the title and ended up crawling across the finish line.
“When I saw that on TV I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s really what I want to do,’ ” says Elaine. Again, she says, her ex was less than enthusiastic. “He said, ‘There is no way you’re going to do that.’ And I was like OK, that is my ticket to go.”
She registered for the next Ironman, which was scheduled for October in Kona, Hawaii. She found training partners — six male athletes from around Columbus who also were planning to tackle the Ironman — and got busy logging miles. Jeff Sheard was among the “Magnificent Seven,” as Elaine calls the group.
“Elaine was a real trooper, because she had to put up with six guys,” says Sheard, who now owns UltraFit/USA Sports Inc. in central Ohio and organizes triathlons for a living. “She’s not a naturally born athlete, but her determination and stick-to-itiveness gets her through. She’s tough.”
It’s a good thing that toughness had her spirit prepared, because the rest of her sure wasn’t.
“I had never swam in the ocean; I had never seen the ocean. I had swam in my farm pond with my Irish setter. I didn’t even know what a swell was,” Elaine says, laughing. “I had zero clue what I was getting into. Zero.”
But she managed the swim, then hopped on her old Schwinn — its basket filled with food more suited for a picnic than a 112-mile race — and took off.
And when she finished that, she ran a marathon.
“I’m really proud of myself for finishing the dumb thing,” Elaine says of the Ironman. “It took me right under 17 hours, but I did it.”
After Kona, Elaine started doing 50-mile ultramarathons. In 1984, she was asked to participate in the Empire State Building Run-Up, an invitation-only event that included 10 women and 30 men from around the world. Running up 86 flights of stairs takes serious training, so Elaine, then a nurse, spent her shift breaks running up and down the hospital’s 10-story stairwell.
Along the way she got divorced and met her second husband, Will Dowden, who has evolved into a one-man support team she calls “Sherpa Will.”
“I heard about this so-called Ironwoman who was running the streets of Columbus, and I said, ‘That’s my kind of woman,’” says Will, who was a pharmacist at the hospital where Elaine worked. The two met in an elevator one day “and it went from there,” Will says.
Elaine has four children, and her family life, coupled with her full-time job, made it understandably difficult to maintain a rigorous training schedule. She’s done 27 marathons over the course of her career but didn’t keep up with the triathlons until a few years ago, after she and Will retired to Sea Pines. Will says when Elaine started ramping up her training he knew something was up. “When I saw her training really hard I thought, ‘Wait a minute, you’re working for the Ironman.’ And sure enough, here we are,” he says.
Elaine originally registered for the Ironman to be held in Louisville in August, but in April found out she was among 200 athletes picked in a lottery to participate in the Ford Ironman World Championship in Kona, Hawaii. Now she’s going back to where it all began.
An athlete himself, Will is happy to support her dream, pump up her bike tires and drag equipment to races. “It’s a real grind. It’s absolutely grueling,” he says of the famed Ironman. “Doing one marathon is extremely hard, but doing three in a row is almost impossible.”
The idea of shooting for such a sky-high goal at Elaine’s age is spectacular, Sheard says. “She’s an inspiration. She proves you’re never too old.”
But with age comes experience, and this time around Elaine’s got high-tech gear, a streamlined 17-pound racing bike and the knowledge of what an ocean swim really feels like. Some old ways, though, are set in stone.
“I’m not into all those gels and stuff,” she says. “I just bring iced tea, orange juice, PB&Js and cookies.” They say to stick with what works, so a picnic lunch and her usual pluck should be more than enough come race day.
“I’m not a natural athlete,” she says. “I just hang in there and get it done.”
