Team Wurtele

Pursuing Our Dreams Together

By InnerVoice

September 2^nd, 2016

PURSUING OUR DREAMS TOGETHER

Heather Wurtele (HW): Trevor was already my best friend and we’ve only grown closer by pursuing our triathlon dreams together. I don’t know if we could have maintained the focus we’ve had for all these years without having each other for support. It is so much more motivating when we head out the door to tackle hard sessions together.

Trevor Wurtele (TW): I agree. Doing this sport day-in, day-out by myself would not be nearly as much fun. Nor would I be nearly as good. I love just hanging out with Heather. We don’t have to talk; we can just enjoy each other’s company.

HW: And in terms of how our racing has impacted other relationships; we’re lucky to have most of our family and friends pretty close by in the Okanagan, and we tend to get together for impromptu dinners, or visits to the beach, or meet up for picnics after swim training. Everyone understands how committed we are and is pretty easy going about making last minute plans. We definitely enjoy our off-season in the winter when we can spend more time just hanging out without worrying so much about nutrition or getting to bed early for training the next day.

FROM OFFICE JOBS TO PRO ATHLETES

TW: Heather and I started in triathlon together. I wanted to do an Ironman just for the sake of finishing one. She helped me learn to swim and I helped her get comfortable on a road bike.

HW: Yeah, he was a great cyclist and taught me how to ride a TT bike. My strength as a cyclist today definitely comes from the leg strength and ability to suffer I gained as a rower, coupled with having Trevor as a great ‘learn by example’ teacher. I taught him the basics of how to swim, and we started going to masters together.

TW: After a little while, and some success, Heather started working with a local Victoria coach, Clint Lien. By that point we started to get a bit more serious with triathlon, dedicating all of our free time to training.

HW: Then we talked about quitting our jobs to become full-time triathletes (I had won Ironman Coeur d’Alene in 2008 while still working for Natural Resources Canada) and most people were very skeptical. I mean, that’s a lot of education, and a good job with a pension to go to “waste”. But we had each other, and we knew if we didn’t commit 100% we’d regret not taking the chance. Trevor’s dad, Glenn, was also a rare - just go for it! - encouraging voice, which we really appreciated.

WE WERE BOTH ACTIVE KIDS

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!

IT CAN BE TOUGH TO STAY POSITIVE

HW: Something that’s surprised me about triathlon that you can only learn by trying is that it never gets any easier; you just go faster. This was sort of a cliché sounding phrase when I first heard it, and I was skeptical (like, of course things get easier!) but it’s totally true. While executing a specific skill may get easier, to keep going faster and win races you actually have to learn to suffer more and more. If anything it gets harder and harder because the margins for error get smaller, and your expectations get higher.

TW: On top of that, you’ll almost never have a perfect race day. Inevitably you’ll look back on the day and find somewhere you could have been better. When times get tough on race day, I try to stay positive no matter what. It’s very hard to do. It’s especially hard to keep pushing if you see your goal slipping away from you or your body starts shutting down. Positive self-talk can help, but often-times things just get so uncomfortable that I find myself unable to find the desire to be positive. In that case getting angry can help move you forward! Never underestimate the power of anger!

HW: It’s totally normal to have negative thoughts, I’ve never raced without them, but I try not to dwell on them. I acknowledge them — maybe they’re telling me I need more calories or electrolytes — and then I focus on what I need to do. I always return my focus to the present moment – ‘Just run. You know what you’re capable of. That’s all that matters.’ Taking action and positive affirmation always helps.

INSPIRATION IN THE SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

TW: I like watching great sporting performances in many different sports. Though, honestly, lately there’s been so much talk about athletes who cheat that I sometimes get super cynical when I see great performances. I try not to let that stuff bother me and just focus on myself and how well Heather and I are doing. Sometimes I think that sport was more fun when I was super naive about doping and cheating. It’s hard to be in the dark in today’s social media-centric world, but it gets to a point where you just have to shut it out and believe you can do well following an honest path. On that note, my wife, Heather, inspires me. In 2016 she’s ranked #1 in the world at the Ironman 70.3 distance, and you can bet your ass someone on that ranking list isn’t competing ethically. She‘s proof that you can be among the best while doing it right. That said, I still believe triathlon is relatively clean across the board. There’s just not a ton of money to inspire the high level corruption or team-sponsored doping. If someone wants to cheat in this sport, they have to do it by themselves. That’s a very sad and lonely path to follow so hopefully it‘s helping to keep things fair.

HW: I’m inspired by people who have had big dreams and have gone after them. Chris Hadfield is definitely a hero of mine. He was the first Canadian astronaut to walk in space; he flew two space shuttle missions and was the Commander of the International Space Station. He also used social media to captivate the world by playing guitar in the space station, and got a huge audience of people interested in science and space exploration, which is awesome! I really enjoyed his autobiography: An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth: What Going to Space Taught Me About Ingenuity, Determination, and Being Prepared for Anything.

WHAT TRIATHLON HAS TAUGHT US

HW: What I’ve learned from triathlon is that I am a very resilient person and I’m getting better and better at letting things go. I’ve always been pretty meticulous and sometimes that would cause me to spend too much time dwelling on things that didn’t go well. Of course it’s fine to feel things deeply, and be upset with failure when you’re so passionately invested in your discipline, but learning how to move on with greater self-awareness and positivity has been an important lesson.

TW: What I’ve learned from triathlon is that I’m not good at answering these types of questions. *Laughs* They’re far too deep. Seriously, though, a lot of people talk about being on a journey of self-exploration. Meh. Whatever. I’m just doing a sport. I love it. I work hard. I want to have good results and maybe inspire others in some small way. For me it doesn’t go much deeper than that.