Just a couple of points from my perspective (though my server won’t let me listen to the interview from work):
Peter may have “lost money” for Hawaii, but he’s talking about the event costs vs. the prize money. He’s doing VERY well for himself, I’m sure, with endorsements and income from sponsors.
As for the coaching aspect, finding 3 hours a day in their schedule isn’t as easy as it sounds. Besides the training, there’s stretching, food prep (hey, they don’t eat at McDonald’s every day), sponsorship obligations, getting enough sleep, etc. There aren’t 3 left-over hours in the day of a pro (if they’re a serious pro).
Just my thoughts…
There is time if you make time. Definitely not easy, but it can be done…
(2001 article, but still on point)
A Balancing Act Of Olympic Proportions Zeiger Separates Triathlon, Research, Excels at Both
By Ross Siler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 28, 2001; Page D01
BALTIMORE – In the six years that triathlon coach Troy Jacobson and Johns Hopkins professor Terri Beaty have been working with Joanna Zeiger, the two have never met, never spoken, never so much as been introduced to each other.
They work barely nine miles apart in this city, Jacobson in the back room of a bike shop and Beaty in an office lined with research journals. But they might as well be in different countries as far as Zeiger is concerned.
When she is training with Jacobson, Zeiger is strictly the Baltimore triathlete who finished fourth in the Sydney Olympics. And when she’s meeting with Beaty, Zeiger is the postdoctorate researcher who completed her PhD this January. And it is her desire to keep things that way.
“They’re completely different, but that’s good – it’s nice to have two separate things,” said Zeiger, 31. “It’s impossible to keep them totally separate, though. When I’m out on my bike this afternoon, I’ll be thinking about the papers I need to write.”
Her colleagues in the department of epidemiology at Hopkins, including Beaty, know that Zeiger finished fourth in the Olympics and was the top American finisher. They couldn’t miss it when she was racing in Sydney on television. But that’s about it. They have no idea about her weekly schedule of triathlons this summer.
“I’ve never been able to keep it all straight,” Beaty said.
Similarly, Zeiger’s training partners, along with Jacobson, know simply that she received her doctorate from Hopkins in January. You can’t miss that, either. It’s hanging on a wall in her apartment, opposite her triathlon trophies. But they don’t know anything about the 233-page thesis, “Gene-Environment Interaction in Birth Defects,” she completed and defended to earn it.
“In a way, I think her research complements her triathloning, because it keeps her from getting overwhelmed in the sport,” said Jacobson, a longtime Ironman competitor. “It gives her a good distraction. And it’s a different kind of challenge for her – mental rather than physical.”
Zeiger won the Mrs. T’s Triathlon in Chicago on Sunday and next will compete at the Ironman World Championships in Hawaii in October. She also has three papers that are pressing. Two are on oral clefts and one on the congenital heart defects she studies.
Sometimes the twin aspects of her life that pull Zeiger apart come together perfectly. That will be the case in October, when she will stop in San Diego after the Hawaii Ironman to attend the annual conference of the American Society of Human Genetics. There, Zeiger will present the results of her research and discuss it with some of the leading scholars in the nation.
More often, though, Zeiger is caught in a battle to balance her schedule. She spent a recent afternoon dressed in bicycle shorts and jersey, entering research data into a laptop in her apartment. After leaving for a 37-mile ride, she returned to crunch more numbers after changing into her running gear.
“Somehow it all fits in,” she said.
Zeiger admits she would be able to live a comfortable life simply as a professional triathlete. She is sponsored by Cannondale, NYPPe.com, Saucony, Speedo and Timex, and the prize money at events is sufficient – up to $75,000 for winning the Ironman in Hawaii, in which Zeiger finished fifth last year. But Zeiger says she couldn’t part with her research at Hopkins.
“I enjoy the balance between athletics and academics and research,” Zeiger said. “I probably have to give up on some sleep and relaxation time to do them. But I don’t really enjoy relaxing and being idle – I like having things to do. And for all the times I feel harried, it’s worth it to have both.”
In back-to-back weeks this summer, Zeiger finished third at the World Triathlon Championships in Edmonton, Alberta, and then took second at the summer Ironman in Lake Placid, N.Y. Although both are triathlons, the two races couldn’t be more different. The international championships are short, lasting about two hours, and quick transitions are crucial. The Ironman, with a 2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike ride and 26.2-mile run, lasts more than nine hours and is one of the most demanding events on the planet.
Jacobson started training with Zeiger in 1995 and became her coach two years later. He said he has never met a triathlete who works as hard as Zeiger. Her training schedule calls for more than 300 miles of cycling, 70 miles of running and 15 miles of swimming a week. Added up, Zeiger covers the distance from Baltimore to Cleveland every seven days.
“She’s willing to do whatever it takes to get faster,” Jacobson said. “If the rain is coming down, then she’s out on her bike. And if it’s 110 degrees with poor air quality, she’s still out there training.”
It all started in 1993 when Zeiger borrowed a bicycle from someone in her master’s swimming class, received some offhand tips and took first in her age group in the Muncie (Ind.) Endurathon. She had always been a champion swimmer, qualifying for the Olympic trials in 1988 and 1992, and an excellent distance runner. She liked the energy of it all and after one triathlon, Zeiger was hooked.
At about the same time, Zeiger was finishing up her master’s degree in genetic counseling at Northwestern University and decided to continue her studies and get a PhD. She applied to Johns Hopkins’ School of Hygiene and Public Health early in 1995, listing that she had raced in the Hawaii Ironman under the miscellaneous section of her application.
“I’m there for research, and it was miscellaneous in the research world,” said Zeiger, who today lists her fourth-place finish at Sydney under a new heading – non-academic activities – at the bottom of her updated résumé. Zeiger majored in psychology at Brown University as an undergraduate.
She was accepted at Hopkins and began studying with Beaty. Zeiger usually goes to Hopkins three days a week to meet with Beaty and provide updates on her research. She co-wrote six papers and has one published in the August 2001 edition of Annuals of Epidemiology entitled “A case-control study of nonsyndromic oral clefts in Maryland.”
Although she can move from the world of racing to chemical receptors in minutes, Beaty estimated that Zeiger’s training slowed her doctoral progress somewhere between 30 and 50 percent.
But she is quick to add that that was not a problem. “Some people take that long anyway and they’re not doing the Olympics,” Beaty said. “It’s all about percent effort and percent yield, and Joanna excels at that.”
Zeiger adheres to a strict schedule and, over the course of a typical day, will change clothes seven times. From the sweats she wears to the pool at 5:30 in the morning, to her swim suit, then to her running apparel, to her work clothes, to her cycling outfit, back to her running clothes and finally into her casual clothes for the evening. “I’m doing laundry all the time,” she admitted, firing up the washer at 3:45 one afternoon. “At least a load a day.”
Most of her training time is spent alone with her thoughts. She dives into a lane at the Meadowbrook Aquatic Center and then swims for an hour and a half by herself, pausing only to check the clock. She regularly does three-and-a-half hour bike rides on her own as well.
Jacobson will draw up workouts for her, and sometimes they will ride together, but the one thing Zeiger said she doesn’t need is somebody looking over her shoulder. “All the years I did swimming I had a coach overseeing every stroke I took and monitoring everything I did,” she said. “I’ve been there.”
Instead, she will round up friends in the Meadowbrook parking lot to go on a run at 7 a.m. and then link back up with Miguel Ferrer, a good friend and financial analyst, for an afternoon ride. Zeiger trains in at least two of three triathlon disciplines every day. Her training partners describe her as the most determined competitor they’ve ever encountered.
“It’s something else how focused she can be,” Ferrer said. “I talked with her three or four times during the Ironman last week – about where she was on the course and how she was doing – and she only remembered one of them afterward.”
Her swim coach at Meadowbrook, John Burke, said Zeiger has an inner drive that can’t be equaled. “I’ll put up what I think is a challenging workout for the day and she’ll say, ‘John, that’s too easy,’ and increase the laps or the speed or something,” Burke said. “She never needs to be pushed or prodded into doing anything.”
About the only question is where Zeiger will go next. With her doctorate, Zeiger eventually could join a pharmaceutical company or become a college professor. But she has no immediate plans to leave Hopkins. Jacobson, meanwhile, believes Zeiger could finish first in the 2004 Olympics in Athens, as well as someday win the Ironman World Championships.
“I think she’s got what it takes to do anything,” Jacobson said.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A5506-2001Aug27¬Found=true
