HOW TRIATHL TIMOTHY O’DO
A candid conversation with Kona’s top American T
imothy O’Donnell performed like a machine in 2013. Just look at the numbers: 8:01:31. That’s his course-record setting time at Ironman Brazil, 18 minutes ahead of the next competitor. 8:22:25. That’s his fifth-place Kona time, 14 minutes ahead
of the next American finisher. The Boulderite believes he can break the 11-year American
Kona drought (the last star-spangled champ was Tim DeBoom in 2002) and we believe he can, too. But as O’Donnell tells our writer Erin Beresini, it hasn’t always been rainbows and butter- flies for America’s golden boy. It’s been a crazy road to the top — a road lined with explosives, E. coli and funky facial hair.
EB: I just Twitter-stalked you. You have a fabulous mustache going on right now.
TO: I got roped into a Movember team called Biscuits and Gravy, which is a bunch of triathlon guys having some fun and raising some awareness for men’s health. It’s quite complicat- ed. There’s rules and everything. You can’t connect at the chin — that’s a goatee. You can’t connect up by the ears — that’s a beard. You really gotta be on top of your grooming.
EB: You also just donated a bunch of money to Team RWB.
TO: Yeah, I donated $10 for every athlete who beat me at Ironman Florida.
EB: Most people would be motivated to go faster when they have money on the line like that, but it seems to have made you go slower. How much did you part with?
TO: I donated $750. There were spectators on the course yell- ing at me when I was run-walking about how much money I was losing — giving me updates on my debt, so it was fun. I had a Snickers bar in T2. It was cool to actually get to thank the volunteers and interact with the age-group athletes on the course. It gave me a new level of appreciation for the sport.
EB: I like that a 9:15 Ironman is a social pace for you. Were you always such a rockstar?
TO: I grew up in a swimming family — eat, sleep, breathe swimming. I was by far the worst of the four of us [O’Donnell has two older brothers and an older sister]. It was comical at
times. Often at the championship meets, the three of them would qualify, and I wouldn’t, so I’d just kind of tag along with all of the lounge chairs and hang out. But I loved it. I had a good work ethic, and it paid off in high school. I had a swim coach who was total old school — huge volume, no toys. If we kicked, it didn’t count toward the total yardage of the prac- tice. I think it really developed my engine to be able to excel at Ironman racing.
EB: Let’s talk about that. How did you go from being a human porpoise to a triathlete?
TO: Well I tried to do a triathlon in high school as a relay. There’s a race called Wilkes-Barre Triathlon. I had two teach- ers who recruited me to be their swimmer — kind of the ace in the hole for their team. So I was swimming in the lake all summer, then we went to the race briefing before the race and they said, ‘we have to cancel the swim due to the unsafe level of E. coli in the lake. And by the way, if you’ve been swimming off the beach, you might want to go get tested.’
EB: Gross!
TO: Yeah. So that race never happened. But I did the West Point Triathlon my senior year of high school while my broth- er, Thomas, was on the Naval Academy tri club team. He’s two-and-a-half years older and has always been a role model for me. So I went up there and I got on his 1987 Schwinn that he got in fifth grade. That was my race bike, and I had a little Speedo, and I went out there and crushed everybody in the swim, then slowly got passed by pretty much everybody in the race. I remember one of the guys on my brother’s tri team riding by and saying, ‘don’t worry Timmy, we’ll teach you how to ride a bike one day!’
EB: Ha! How sweet.
TO: The next year when I was a freshman at the Academy, Thomas was a senior. He was the captain of the tri team and he made me try out. He dragged me out of my room. I bor- rowed his brand new carbon bike, went out there and didn’t know what I was doing. I hit potholes, I dropped the chain, I scraped a couple layers of carbon off the chainstay, I stripped the bolts in the aerobars and the aerobars were falling off. I got off the bike and he just had this look of shock, like, ‘what did you do to my bike!? Just go run!’ So I ran and made the team.
42 USA TRIATHLON WINTER 2014
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