TW: I’ve done a lot of different sports through my life. As a kid, I was all over the map; baseball, soccer and karate in the summer and downhill skiing in the winter. My dad was the head coach of the Canadian National Downhill Ski team for 7 years, including through the Calgary Olympics. Needless to say, skiing was definitely a sport where I wanted to compete at the highest levels. It wasn’t until I found bike racing when I was 15 years old that I quit skiing and put all my energy into cycling. I was good at cycling and won the Canadian Junior Championships in 1996. At that time, I had a friend who was living in Belgium, so I spent a couple summers as a junior cyclist racing over there. At age 19 I was still racing in Europe, but it had become pretty clear that I wasn’t going to be as good as I wanted to be, so I packed it in. In hindsight, I‘m super glad I quit cycling when I did. 19 is a young age to give up on endurance sports dreams, but with 20/20 hindsight, seeing the choices cyclists had to make a few years later, I probably would have been done soon enough anyway. From there; I went back to school for a few years and did some recreational running and bike racing to stay active. It wasn’t until I was 2004, when I was 24, that Heather and I both decided to try a triathlon.

HW: Triathlon didn’t enter my consciousness until I was in my mid-20s. I was an active kid who liked downhill skiing, like Trevor, water skiing, mountain biking, volleyball, backpacking and just anything out in nature. I rowed varsity for the University of British Columbia but abandoned national team aspirations for academics. I met my then ‘buddy from high school’, now husband, Trevor, when I was doing my Masters of Science at University of Victoria, and we got into adventure racing. We had a blast learning how to paddle surf skis and really got into the challenge of it. We’re both competitive and enjoy pushing our limits to see how far and fast we could go. I finished second in the three-day Sea to Summit solo race in Panorama and was officially hooked on multi-sport racing. Triathlon was appealing because it was a little simpler (being able to answer random quiz questions in the woods didn’t factor into your ability to win races!) and there was more of a progression in the sport with the opportunity to qualify for world championship events. I did my first triathlon, the UBC Sprint, in 2004, and then the Baker’s Olympic distance and Victoria Half Ironman that same spring. I raced on an old-school aluminum road bike that had shifters on the down tube and was mostly held together with Shoe-Goo. I was second in my age group in all those races. It has been pure love ever since!

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