Martin is real Ironman

PU grad student is top triathlete

By: Justin Feil
   Since high school, Chris Martin had wanted to give the triathlon a shot. When he finally entered one a year ago, he saw immediate success at the Columbia Triathlon in Maryland.
   "It took off from there," said the Princeton Junction resident. "They have a first-timer award, and I won that by a whole bunch. That’s a big kick in the pants, to know you can do that and do that well. From then, I was signing up for anything within a two-state radius."
   Martin is hoping to expand that radius outside of the 48 continental United States. He’s hoping to qualify for the Hawaii Ironman that will celebrate its 25th anniversary Oct. 18, 2003. Martin would like to be there.
   Martin, a graduate student in Princeton University’s chemical engineering program, narrowly missed his first chance to qualify when he finished third in the 25-29 year old age group at the Blackwater EagleMan Half Ironman in Maryland on Sunday. Only the age group winner received an automatic entry to Hawaii.
   "My goal was just to break 4:15," said Martin, whose official time was 4 hours, 10 minutes, 59 seconds. "If I had a perfect one, I thought I could go under 4:10. There are no complaints about the time. There’s definitely room for improvement next year, but I didn’t leave anything out there, especially on the run."
   Martin finished the 1.2-mile swim in 26:40, the 56-mile bike ride in 2:14:34 and the half-marathon run in 1:25:40. The overall winner was Luke Bell, an Australian professional currently residing in San Diego, who finished the course in 3:47:15. Martin was the fifth amateur overall. The top finisher in his age group was George Worrell of Clermont, Fla., who finished in 4:06.57 for the automatic Hawaii Ironman qualifier.
   Martin’s next chance to qualify will come when he competes in the Lake Placid (N.Y.) Ironman July 27.
   "It’s where I thought I’d have to qualify anyway," said Martin, who will be joined by fellow area resident Jesse Smith of Princeton. "Chances are much more favorable. There are six or seven spots in our age group. I’ve just never done anything that long. It’s just a question of do I have the training to last that long."
   While the EagleMan Half-Ironman had 25 Ironman Qualifier spots, the Lake Placid Ironman has four times as many.
   "There are only a few of these Half-Ironman distances and they have 20 to 25 spots," Martin explained. "There are 100 spots (overall) in the races in the Ironman umbrella."
   The EagleMan was Martin’s first attempt in a qualifying race, and it proved not to be as tough a race as had been anticipated. Temperatures didn’t soar, which have caused problems on a course with no shade.
   "I’d never done this one before, but they were pretty good conditions based on what other people have told me," Martin said. "The swim times and bike times seemed a little slower than last year. There was s slight current on the swim and a slight headwind coming back on the bike. I didn’t think it was nearly as bad as it could have been."
   Three weeks earlier, Martin was fourth overall at the Columbia Triathlon, including professionals, in which he had debuted a year earlier. He covered the shorter Olympic distance triathlon — a 1.5-kilometer swim, 41-kilometer bike ride and 10k run — in 2:07:36. The year before, he had finished it in 2:13:46.
   "They’re different races because they’re different distances," Martin said. "This (EagleMan) is the first one that had national caliber competition. The other one was more regional. This time, the race director said there were 42 states represented and four states outside the U.S, so that’s a big confidence booster. Columbia was neat because it was the same as last year and I could see how I progressed, whereas in this, I could compare myself against the bigger picture.
   "The difference between the two, in the Olympic distance one the swim is a bigger part, percentage-wise. Here, the run and the bike are more important. I was happy to see that I could hold my own on the bike. The run is the missing link long-term."
   Martin was a good high school swimmer in Tucson, Ariz., where he grew up before attending Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It was in high school that he got first-hand exposure to the triathlon culture.
   "When I was doing age group swimming growing up, my sister and I were always distance swimmers and we’d stay late when the professional triathletes would swim with us," said the 27-year-old. "That’s when I learned what the pros would do. We’d struggle and tag along with them. A lot of people would train out in Tucson."
   But it was still many years before Martin finally was bit by the triathlon bug, and it didn’t happen as he had planned.
   "It wasn’t until grad school when I started to gain weight and needed something to do that I started doing swimming events again," said Martin, who hopes to finish his graduate studies next year. "It was my New Year’s resolution in Jan. 2000. I was training to do the 7.8-mile swim in the Hudson River, the Little Red Lighthouse swim that goes from the George Washington Bridge down to Chelsea Piers.
   "It was supposed to be Sept. 15 and Sept. 11 happened and it was cancelled. I was all trained and tapered to go, and a friend talked me into doing the Philadelphia half marathon. I did all right there, and I thought that maybe I could do this whole marathon thing. I got my act together and trained for the Philly marathon. Then, it was just ‘Go buy a bicycle.’ At that point, I was two-thirds of the way there. I spent the spring of 2002 learning how to ride and then I entered Columbia."
   It took off from that point a year ago. In the past year, the triathlon has taken Chris Martin to every neighboring state that holds triathlons and, he hopes this fall, to a state that’s only neighbor is the Pacific Ocean.